PCIe lanes, juggling GPU, raid cards and other PCIe devices

[SlothPaladin]

I have run out of PCIe lanes, I didn't really know that PCIe lanes existed until I ran out.

 

I have a i7-5820K in an ASUS X99-A.

 

I moved last year and due to the housing setup I plugged in a PCIe wireless card, I already had a 16x GPU as well as a 8x Raid card and a 4x Intel 750 SSD.

 

The SSD stopped working, but I had set it up as a cache drive for After Effects and Premiere and wasn't doing any video work at the time and didn't notice it had stopped working. Fast forward to Christmas 2018, I picked up an Oculus Rift when they went on sale, when I finally got mine, I started running into USB bandwidth issues (guess I should have got a Vive) so I picked up a USB 3.0 PCIe card and to my surprise it disabled my wireless card when I plugged it in.

 

As I researched it I realized it was why my Intel SSD had stopped working (when I initially realized it wasn't working I assumed hardware failure)

my CPU only has 28 PCIe lanes, I could upgrade to a 40 lane CPU

The motherboard says that this is the PCIe configuration:

Now am I reading this correctly? it looks like upgrading to a 40 lane CPU will not give me more usable slots, just allow me to use cards that take more PCIe lanes, or would upgrading allow me to add another PCIe card?

 

My working cards:

x16 - GTX 1080

x8  - Raid card

x1  - Wireless adapter

Not working:

x4  - Intel 750 SSD

x4  - USB 3.0 bus

 

Will upgrading to a i7-5930K allow me to use one or both of the non-working expansion cards?

[Electronics Wizardy]

I dont' think getting a 40 lane cpu will help you here, it doesn't enable any more slots, it just give more lanes to the slots.

 

Why not put your wifi card in a 1x slot, now it will use the chipset lanes.

 

So Does this work

 

slot 1(x16) gpu

slot 2(x1) empty(covered by gpu)

slot3(x8) raid card

slot4(x4) 750 ssd

slot5(x1)wifi card

slot6(x4 from chipset) usb card)

 

 

[SlothPaladin]

It is actually in the 1x slot, wait, maybe by M.2 SSD is using other PCIe lanes, ugg

[Snipergod87]

m.2 NVME ssd's will also use PCI-express lanes.

[SlothPaladin]

Maybe the wireless did not stop the PCIe SSD from working, it might have stopped when I installed the m.2 drive, guess I could test it out. Kind of makes me want to upgrade the whole system to a Threadripper setup

 

10 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

So Does this work

 

slot 1(x16) gpu

slot 2(x1) empty(covered by gpu)

slot3(x8) raid card

slot4(x4) 750 ssd

slot5(x1)wifi card

slot6(x4 from chipset) usb card)

No, that 100% does not work. Even without the 750 in slot 4 I can't see the USB card

[Electronics Wizardy]

12 minutes ago, SlothPaladin said:

It is actually in the 1x slot, wait, maybe by M.2 SSD is using other PCIe lanes, ugg

When you use the m.2 slot it disables the last pcie x16 slot, nothing to do with the cpu pcie lanes though.

[SlothPaladin]

Currently if I use slot 3 it disables the wireless in slot 5, the raid is in slot 4

 

EDIT:

This information was incorrect. Using slot 3 does not disable the wireless, I have no idea why the wireless turned off the first time I installed the USB card, but it seems to work fine. User error, I guess.

 

I'm going to mark this as solved, the M.2 card disabled the 750 SSD, and the wireless card is run by the board and is not using PCIe lanes, for some weird anomaly the wireless card turned off the first time I installed USB card, but retrying it I had no issues running the USB card with the raid, GPU and wireless card.