M.2 on Asus Hero VII vs. SATA SSD

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Exigeous

Commendable
Aug 20, 2016
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1,510
Forgive the noob question, I searched but wound up confused. I have a Hero Maximus VII Z97 chipset board and currently have the new Zotac Extreme GTX 1080 video card. I'm running a single 250GB SSD (forget which, nothing special) and am interested in upgrading to the Samsung M.2 950 EVO. My CPU is a 4770k which says it has 16 PCIe lanes.

If my video card is taking up 16 lanes what's left for the M.2 drive? I also have a gigabit PCIe network card but could easily use the on-board network card (added the PCIe as I thought the one on the board had failed but it's good to go). Should I remove that network card, is it hurting performance? Would upgrading to an m.2 make a noticable performance difference on my motherboard?

Thanks!!
 
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popatim

popatim

Titan
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Dec 2, 2009
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The GPU slots use the cpu's pcie lanes. The other slots &M.2 use lanes from the northbridge.

There is no 950evo, I'm not sure if you meant 950pro or 850evo so I tried to cover both bases

You motherbd only has a 10GB/s m.2 slot and would not fully support a 950pro and there would be no point in an m.2 850evo since its only a sata drive in m.2 form and not a bit faster then the same 850evo in 2.5" form. Just buy a sata 850evo and avoid the pcie lanes constriction IMO.

To run an m.2 950pro you would need a pcie adapter card in the second GPU slot which means dropping your GPU into x8 mode.
That 3rd x16 slot is a 4 lane pcie2 slot so you wouldn't get full speed from the 950pro using that... (4 lanes is good but pcie2 is the bottleneck)
 
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E

Exigeous

Commendable
Aug 20, 2016
3
0
1,510
Ah, sorry I said EVO, yes I meant the Pro. Also thanks for the details, making sense to me now. A few follow on questions:

- What impact does it have to lower the GPU to 8x? I have to assume rather large and as the GPU is far more important to me (gaming machine) than disk speed I wouldn't do PCIe for that reason - just curious.

- You say the 950 Pro wouldn't be fully taken advantage of - but wouldn't it still be faster than my SSD? I have an older PNY that I'm only getting about 350/200 read/write from so it seems that just about anything would be a big upgrade. A 256GB 950 Pro is under $200 so not a bank breaker.

Thanks again for the help, really appreciate it.
 
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