Question about using 2nd slot on SLI motherboard for non-GPU

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bman3

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May 7, 2014
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Here's what I'm wondering. Can I buy a z370 SLI motherboard, which splits the 16 CPU lanes into x8/x8 slots, and use the 2nd slot for a bootable NVMe PCIe drive?

I realize there are drawbacks, for example my GPU will only be running at x8 and the other slot will only use 50% of the lanes by using a typical x4 NVMe drive. But, I'm still curious. Is this possible?
 
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Barty1884
Can you? Yes. Absolutely.

You'd be hard pressed to saturate the bandwidth of PCIe 3.0 x8 with a single GPU anyway, so it's not likely to impact performance at all.


So yes, it's possible - but I'd question why. The Z370 chipset is usually implemented with at least 2x M.2 slots for x4 NVME drives.
While yes, strictly PCIe SSDs exist and are a bit faster (generally) and riser cards exist.
But outside of a few specific workloads, they're generally overkill for 99.99% of users.
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Barty1884

Barty1884

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Can you? Yes. Absolutely.

You'd be hard pressed to saturate the bandwidth of PCIe 3.0 x8 with a single GPU anyway, so it's not likely to impact performance at all.


So yes, it's possible - but I'd question why. The Z370 chipset is usually implemented with at least 2x M.2 slots for x4 NVME drives.
While yes, strictly PCIe SSDs exist and are a bit faster (generally) and riser cards exist.
But outside of a few specific workloads, they're generally overkill for 99.99% of users.
 
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bman3

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May 7, 2014
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Thanks for the answers. I currently have an x99 system, and I'm toying with the idea of an upgrade. But, I'm just not sold on x299 right now. I kind of like the idea of Z370 with 6-cores at 5 GHz. I run a pretty loaded system, with NVMe add-in-card (not M.2 form factor), SATA SSD, multiple SATA HD's, multiple USB 3.0 drives, etc. So, I was looking for upgrades where I could still run my NVMe add-in-card.
 
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