Hey everyone! I'm planning to build a new PC featuring an RTX 5090 and a Ryzen 9950x or 3D (still deciding between the two). I'm also including a Gen 3 NVMe drive and an Elgato capture card for 4K streaming. I'm worried about bandwidth since my current AM4 board is causing my capture card to skip frames. With the X870 motherboard, will I run into bandwidth issues, or will I have enough headroom? I'm aiming for a 4K/120Hz gaming setup, plus I'll also be doing heavy 3D graphics and AI workloads. Oh, and I have 10 SATA hard drives connected, so I'm curious if getting a board with more lanes is worth it!
2 Answers
Having 10 SATA drives is a bit excessive! You might want to consider moving them to a NAS with a 5GbE connection for better performance. Most modern boards won't have enough native SATA ports to support that many drives.
Honestly, if you're asking about the need for extra lanes, it's probably not a huge issue for you. Most setups with 2-4 SSDs, a GPU, and a network card can manage fine on a B650 board. But since you've got 10 hard drives and a capture card, having more lanes will definitely be beneficial, just to avoid any bottlenecking.
I do have 6 on my current board and 4 more with an expansion card. They’re in a RAID 0 setup for games and such!