Will an Samsung 970 Evo slow down my GPU

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olekristianrudjord

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Apr 19, 2018
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I am going to buy parts for a new gaming pc. I will be buying the ASUS ROG Strix B450-f gaming which has two M.2 slots. I will also be buying a Samsung 970 Evo M.2 NVME SSD and the ZOTAC GTX 1070 ti AMP!

I was wondering where to place my 970 Evo and if that would affect either the GPU or the 970 Evo itself. On the motherboard spesification there is two notes that says:

"When the M.2_1 Socket 3 is operating in SATA or PCIE mode, SATA6G_5/6 ports will be disabled"

"When the M.2_2 is occupied by M.2 device, PCIe x16_1 will run at x8 mode"

What does this mean and will the placement of the 970 Evo slow down itself or the GPU?
 
Solution
K
The GPU goes into the first x16 expansion slot, called PCIe x16_1, to feed it x16 PCIe lanes. If you were to put the 970 into M2_2 then, as it plainly says, the GPU in PCIe x16_1 will only run at x8 mode. This will provide fewer lanes to the GPU but slow it down ? Not very much, not at all noticeable maybe 2 %. So you will install the 970 into M2_1. When you do that, two SATA ports get used up and unavailable for other uses.

That's it.
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karenjoly

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Apr 13, 2018
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The GPU goes into the first x16 expansion slot, called PCIe x16_1, to feed it x16 PCIe lanes. If you were to put the 970 into M2_2 then, as it plainly says, the GPU in PCIe x16_1 will only run at x8 mode. This will provide fewer lanes to the GPU but slow it down ? Not very much, not at all noticeable maybe 2 %. So you will install the 970 into M2_1. When you do that, two SATA ports get used up and unavailable for other uses.

That's it.
 
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drea.drechsler

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Oct 16, 2017
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If it's any consolation the NVME in M.2_2 will get full PCIe gen 3 bandwidth whereas in my board it's getting PCIe gen 2 bandwidth as it stole the 4 lanes from the second PCIEx16/4 socket, which is now non-functional.

But if the your GPU socket loses 8 lanes (from x16 to x8) to give 4 lanes to M.2_2 what happens to the other 4? If i'm not missing something, this strategy is throwing away 4 extremely valuable PCIe gen 3 lanes from the CPU.
 
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genz

genz

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Oct 8, 2012
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Firstly, the M2_1 sounds like the best place for your SSD, as yours in NVME and thus will not affect the SATA ports. I think it's good to point out here that they are probably not using the PCI lanes directly in the first line of the notes. They are letting you know that if you use a SATA M2 card they will be connecting it via SATA headers to socket 5-6 internally, making the physical 5 and 6 SATA connectors not work. If you connect a SATA M.2 via port 2 you get full SATA ports, and an NVME in the first port, allowing you to potentially fit 8 storage devices without splitters.

Use the first port unless you have 6 drives. Less than 4 will not be affected at all.
 
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