I'm looking for recommendations on Ryzen motherboards that allow me to use 2 or 3 NVMe drives in the M.2 slots without sacrificing the full 16x speed of my GPU in PCI slot 1. Specifically, I want to know which models don't share CPU bandwidth between the PCIe and M.2 slots. I'm considering an X870E-E for my 9950X3D setup with a 5090 TUF GPU. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
1 Answer
Basically, any B650(e) or B850(e) board, as well as high-end X670E/X870E motherboards, should work for you. The more premium X870E boards typically don't cut into the main PCIe slot bandwidth because they use an additional chipset. It's worth noting, though, that even with a GPU like the 5090, the difference may not be significant since PCIe 5.0 x8 can perform similarly to PCIe 4.0 x16 in many scenarios. For example, the MSI X870E Tomahawk WiFi keeps the main PCIe 5.0 x16 slot unaffected while sharing bandwidth with USB4 ports on one of the M.2 slots.
That’s good to know! I was worried about losing performance. I guess for most gaming setups, the difference might be negligible.