Can a motherboard restrict Storage Speed?

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Ferrariassassin

Ferrariassassin

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I will be buying a Samsung 950 PRO 256GB M.2 for my Gigabyte GA‑H97‑Gaming 3 motherboard which has a M.2 slot. Besides the CPU and GPU, will the motherboard allow the 950 PRO to fully use all of its speed or is their a faster M.2 slot on a different motherboard or is all M.2 slots the same speed on every motherboard just like how all SATA 3 slots are the same on motherboards? So for short, does the motherboard M.2 slot make a difference in storage speed or is the only thing that matters is the 950 PRO/Storage device itself?
 
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techgeek

techgeek

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Even though a M.2 connector may be keyed for "M" it doesn't necessarily have the full bandwidth that it could have maximum. The motherboard manufacturer determines how many PCI-E lanes or SATA lanes are connected to it. In the case of your motherboard, it says that it can provide up to 10Gbps or 1.25GBs (theoretical bandwidth). Since all the M.2 SSD's I've seen pretty much top out around 900MBs or less, your M.2 slot should let a 950 Pro stretch it's legs.

 
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Ferrariassassin

Ferrariassassin

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Thanks and heres the 950 PRO specs.
Sequential Read Up to 2,200 MB/sec Up to 2,500 MB/sec
Sequential Write Up to 900 MB/sec Up to 1,500 MB/sec

Is my Motherboard fast enough to fully utilize the 950 PRO fully?
 
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techgeek

techgeek

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Firstly I would be careful about that combination. I just had a look at the M.2 QVL and that SSD doesn't appear on it. I would contact GigaByte to see if it will work.

Secondly it looks like your motherboard will bottleneck the read speed for that SSD. You should be OK for write speeds though.

So you may want to rethink this.
 
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Leaps-from-Shadows

Leaps-from-Shadows

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The 9x series chipsets will not allow the 950 Pro drives do their full performance. Most people with those chipsets get numbers around 700-800Mbps for read and write. This is because the chipset only has PCIe 2.0 x2 lanes for the M.2 port. If it were full performance, the manufacturer would brag about 32Gbps performance (PCIe 3.0 x4 maximum).

You would need a PCIe 3.0 x4 to M.2 adapter card (and an available PCIe 3.0 x4 slot) to get full performance from either of the 950 Pro drives.
 
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Ferrariassassin

Ferrariassassin

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So is their no Chipset/motherboard out their to fully utilize the speed and performance of the 950 Pro? Would the Intel 750 PCIe be faster because it is plugged into the PCI-E 3.0 slot? I am trying to research up on this but its so confusing to me. I though Storage speed was only limited by the actual device itself. I know SATA3 stops at 6Gbps or something and than you need to do SATA EXPRESS to do 10Gbps and than M.2 to go even further i think. Sorry if i am wrong but i hope you can shed some light on me.
 
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Ferrariassassin

Ferrariassassin

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Well i will be upgrading my CPU to an i7-6700K ans also my motherboard and with 4x8gb of DDR4 Ram of any speed what ever is cheapest because Ram speed does nothing for games as long as its 1600MHz and above in my opinion and ok thanks man.
 
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