Mother Board and NVME Question

[HunterSho]

Hi All,

Have a ROG Z790 Maximus Hero with a 1TB 980 Pro (will be the OS primary C: drive) and also a 2TB 980 Pro that will be used for game storage. What NVME slots do you all recommend I put these in? Don't think I want to use the ROG Hyper M.2 card as it will bring the PCIe slot from 16x down to 8x. The user manual was less than helpful or I may be too ignorant to understand it lol.

Thanks in advance for your suggestions!

 

[Colif]

It is very confusing...

The top slot is run by the CPU, all the others are on the chipset
CPU -
Intel ® 13th & 12th Gen Processors
M.2_1 slot (Key M), type 2242/2260/2280/22110 (supports PCIe 4.0 x4
mode.)
Hyper M.2_1 slot (Key M) via ROG Hyper M.2 card, type
2242/2260/2280/22110 (supports PCIe 5.0 x4 mode)**

Motherboard chipset -
Intel ® Z790 Chipset
M.2_2 slot (Key M), type 2242/2260/2280 (supports PCIe 4.0 x4 mode)
M.2_3 slot (Key M), type 2242/2260/2280
(supports PCIe 4.0 x4 & SATA modes)
Hyper M.2_1 slot (Key M) via ROG Hyper M.2 card, type
2242/2260/2280/22110 (supports PCIe 4.0 x4 mode)**
Hyper M.2_2 slot (Key M) via ROG Hyper M.2 card, type
2242/2260/2280/22110 (supports PCIe 4.0 x4 mode)***

https://dlcdnets.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/LGA1700/ROG_MAXIMUS_Z790_HERO/E21512_ROG_MAXIMUS_Z790_HERO_UM_V3_WEB.pdf?model=ROG%20MAXIMUS%20Z790%20HERO

Ideally you use the top slot - m.2_1 - for windows boot drive, and you can use any of the others for the other drive

hypercard needed for pcie 5 cards to get full speed.

 

[HunterSho]

Ideally you use the top slot - m.2_1 - for windows boot drive, and you can use any of the others for the other drive

hypercard needed for pcie 5 cards to get full speed.

Appreciate the response.

If in the future I do want a gen 5 M.2 drive, will using the hypercard and thus reducing the graphics card PCIe from 16x to 8x be that noticeable you think? GPU in question will be a 4080.

 

[Colif]

You would hardly notice a speed increase using PCIe5 compared to the speed drop you would get running GPU Slower.

The time difference in loading anything isn't noticeable. PCIe 4 is fast enough now. The faster the drives get, the less you notice an increase. They need to start measuring them in write times as those are used more in a day.

 

[Slasken]

Appreciate the response.

If in the future I do want a gen 5 M.2 drive, will using the hypercard and thus reducing the graphics card PCIe from 16x to 8x be that noticeable you think? GPU in question will be a 4080.

Nope, you won't notice any difference between 8x and 16x.

You won't notice much difference between PCIe 4.0 and 5.0 either, or even 3.0. CPU is the bottleneck, and it is not all about sequential reads.