Using M2 to PCI-E X4 adapter card on Sabertooth Z87 to get full NVMe speeds

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wormwood19

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Aug 31, 2017
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I'm building a second computer for backup from older leftover components and want to know if I'll get full NVMe speeds with fast M.2 SSD drives. I'm planning on buying this M2 to PCI-E X4 adapter card or something similar along with a fast NVMe drive. I'll be using the BIOS hack to enable it as an NVMe boot drive. My Sabertooth Z87 MB has three PCIe X16 slots and though I may use SLI someday, I'll never use a three GPU configuration. Can I install the M2 to PCI-E X4 adapter card into the last PCIe 2.0 16x slot and get the full potential speed of the NVMe card or does it have to use one of the two PCIe 3.0 16x slots? Is there any type of bottleneck with this setup? For example, if I get an NVMe M.2 SSD drive with a rated 2500 MB/sec read speed will I see results close to that spec?

Thanks for any help
 
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wormwood19

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Aug 31, 2017
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Yes, I'd be using this hack to get it to boot with the new adapter card and an NVMe device. I just did some checking on these M2 to PCI-E X4 adapter cards and many of them do seem to be optimized for the PCIe 3.0 slot rather than PCIe 2.0. I wanted to make sure I can do this with an older Z87 board. I just thought it would be kind of fun to have a modern NVMe M.2 SSD card in an old motherboard that can read at 3000+ MB/sec :D

I'll probably go with an Asus Accessory Hyper M.2 X4 Mini Card for maximum compatibility.
 
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lookout48469

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Feb 2, 2018
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I decided not to open the m2 card and return it. My 970ag46 mobo is a dinosaur, im afraid it wont work. Just went with a sandisk 3d nano ssd card instead, ill wait till i upgrade mobo that has a m2. The ssd has been great, 30 sec boot time trumps the minutes boot on normal hard drive, havent downloaded much or played with it much still trying to get things back to normal from a issue, but the one thing i did download to the ssd was at 270mb which is alot more than the 70mb speed on old drive.
 
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evilhawk00

Jan 25, 2019
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Hi, FYI~

I'm using sabertoothz87 with my custom BIOS modified from version 2302. With Intel 760p 512GB SSD installed on a Asus Hyper M.2 X4 Mini Card, it works perfect with full speed. I installed the hyper mini card on PCIE_2 Slot(PCIE3.0) and it almost has the speed of the SSD as described.


However, there's a little problem(bug?). If you wish to install windows 10 on ssd, during the installation, you have to remove all 3.5 sata hdd otherwise the windows installer will create the efi partition on hdd instead of the ssd. You'll have to replug them back to your pc after the installation.
 
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