PCIE Bifurcation (Asus Z9PE-D8 WS)

[Blindsay]

Hey all,

wanted to add some m.2 nvme drives to my old Asus Z9PE-D8 WS build and obviously it doesnt have any m.2 slots.

I was going to populate the pcie slots with a few drives with single m.2 adapters but that seems a waste of all the slots and i knew there are cards out there like the Asus Hyper M.2 but your motherboard must support bifurcation.

Looking in my bios (Screenshot attached) it appears that my board does but i am a little confused by it as A: im not sure which ports correspond to which physical slots on the board and B: the amount of ports listed here does not match up to how many the board actually has

thoughts?

[TheRandomness]

Honestly, it'd be best to leave the settings on auto, as it usually does a good job of figuring out what cards are in place when they're installed.

[Blindsay]

Just now, TheRandomness said:

Honestly, it'd be best to leave the settings on auto, as it usually does a good job of figuring out what cards are in place when they're installed.

The auto settings though let me change like if it is PCIE GEN1 GEN2 GEN3

 

For the port i have to manually select X16 or X8/X8 or X4/X4/X4/X4

[Blindsay]

Interesting, Updated the BIOS to the latest and one of the options disappeared

[Blindsay]

Reached out to Asus to see if they could tell me, i looked at the manual on their site and these settings arent even mentioned

[tristansummers]

Did this work? Thinking same thing. 

top is the to pslots, bottom is the bottom, because the 8x slot is at the bottom.

nb the top slot is PCIe-2 only. Stick a gpu in and look in hwinfo app. move it to another slot and it is PCIe3

You need it set to 4x4x4x4, as that is what each card is.

It needs to be in a 16 slot, so I would put it in the top slot as that is PCIe2.

If you have 2 GPU they will go in 3 or 5 and be on a processor each.

You won't be able to boot from any of these cards, but I am hoping you can still use them.

If so I shall be selling my ioFX!

[tristansummers]

I am sure you can software RAID them with Disk Manager

[tristansummers]

or put it in the second to bottom slot, because you can't fit a double width GPU in there anyway.

If you put it in slot 1 or 3, you can't use slot 2 or 4 as that switches to 8x8 automatically with the hardware switch.

 

[masmas]

okey do you have or can save and post that bios please for humanity !!!!!

[masmas]

hi what bios version was that ?

 

[pguilb]

Bump.

Hey, same thing here. can't use 7 pciex1 riser in the 7 ports (using 2nd hands mining gpus for blender rendering machine), which should normally work am I right?

+ the first bifurcation iption keeps turning back to 8x8 even if I try 4x4x4x4 after reboot...)

A workaround anyone ?

Thanks a lot!

 

EDIT: found my solution, just nneeded to enable 4g decoding.

Edited December 12, 2023 by pguilb
found the solution