PCIe lanes: CPU vs motherboard for X99
1 hour ago, goof doofus said:Then I think things are becoming a bit clearer. In the PCIe lane diagram, it seems like all the x16 slots go to CPU lanes and all the rest take up the additional 8-ish motherboard non-CPU lanes. Is that right?
You hit the nail on the head!
1 hour ago, goof doofus said:Can non-GPU PCIe peripherals go in either? Could I put PCIe ssd's and wireless adapters in both x16 and x1 slots, depending on what's available after the GPUs?
Absolutely! A great example of this is if you wanted to run a RAID 0 with two PCIe M.2 drives like a 950 Pro. One M.2 would run off of the chipset PCIe lanes while the other would run through the CPU PCIe lanes. Of course x99 does not support M.2 hardware RAID, but doing it through Windows works fantastic and is just as fast if not faster contrary to popular belief. This solution has netted me 5 GB/s reads and 3 GB/s writes. This has a big advantage over something like running two or three M.2 drives via the DMI 3.0 of a Z170 board as it would be limited to roughly 3 GB/s in both directions and two let alone three fast M.2s would saturate the platform.
Hope that helped.
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