I recently got an x870E Aorus Master motherboard and have three Samsung 990 Pro SSDs to install. There are four M.2 slots, but I noticed that if I use the bottom two slots (M2B_CPU and M2C_CPU), the GPU slot will be reduced from x16 to x8. I'm a bit confused about whether these bottom slots share bandwidth with the x16 PCIe slot. Also, is it okay to use the top slot (M2A_CPU) above the GPU as my main drive for the OS? Thanks for your help!
1 Answer
Honestly, for gaming and general use, it shouldn't matter which slots you pick. Unless you're doing something that needs massive drive throughput, having the GPU run at x8 won't have a noticeable impact on performance. Just make sure to use the M2A_CPU for your OS drive if that's what you want, and you'll be good! I'm just curious why you went for three of the same SSD. What capacity did you choose?
I got 3 SSDs, each 4TB, because I wanted to skip hard drives. I'm aiming for a high-performance setup for gaming and editing. But what do you mean by "sustained workloads"?