Considering pcie m.2 adapter, advice?

Okenchi · June 6, 2020

Trying to push a 890fxa-gd70 a bit further- the last upgrade question I have is whether a pcie m.2 adapter is a good idea. From what I'm reading it should not pull lanes from the video card- but I'm not sure I read that right. I have no other cards except the graphics card in the system not any intent to add any for now (wifi would be nice to have but I'm hard-line right now).

My real intent is I'd like to look into adding an m.2 cache drive over a larger 3-4 TB hdd. I'll keep my existing hdd or sata SSD* as the boot drive.

TLDR questions-

Will a pcie m.2 card affect the video card at all?

Running a cache drive worthwhile? Linus demoed some cache software in a video that seemed to indicate so.

Any guesses why my existing Samsung SSD blows up the bootability? I feel like it's a power issue but that's a hunch based on USB glitches.

*My existing SSD keeps having glitches that ruin the bootability if it. I *think* that's fixed but I don't trust it enough to switch from the safer HDD just yet.

Kisai · June 6, 2020

41 minutes ago, Okenchi said:

Trying to push a 890fxa-gd70 a bit further- the last upgrade question I have is whether a pcie m.2 adapter is a good idea. From what I'm reading it should not pull lanes from the video card- but I'm not sure I read that right. I have no other cards except the graphics card in the system not any intent to add any for now (wifi would be nice to have but I'm hard-line right now).

My real intent is I'd like to look into adding an m.2 cache drive over a larger 3-4 TB hdd. I'll keep my existing hdd or sata SSD* as the boot drive.

TLDR questions-

Will a pcie m.2 card affect the video card at all?

Running a cache drive worthwhile? Linus demoed some cache software in a video that seemed to indicate so.

Any guesses why my existing Samsung SSD blows up the bootability? I feel like it's a power issue but that's a hunch based on USB glitches.

*My existing SSD keeps having glitches that ruin the bootability if it. I *think* that's fixed but I don't trust it enough to switch from the safer HDD just yet.

Unless you stick it in a PCIe slot that is the farthest from the GPU, it will kick the GPU into 8x mode. But then you might only get 1 lane, which makes it about as fast as a SATA drive.

On an Intel system, z87 (Haswell) and later boards will allow you to boot from such a thing as they support NVMe drives, but earlier models will not, and it can only be used as a secondary drive. On AMD boards, this feature isn't available until relatively recent boards, as many MB's have m2 slots but they only run at PCIe 2.0 or pull the GPU lanes.

So I would not recommend installing a PCIe m2 adapter in a system that doesn't already have M2 slots if you want to boot from it, and unless you're willing to modify a BIOS, you're likely not going to get it on anything that doesn't have them to begin with.

Okenchi · July 28, 2020

Wish if all places popped up an advertisement for a 4 dollar pcie nvme card. I figured at that cost what the hell, why not?

Fwiw the cheap drive and paired with the 4x addin perform well- by far faster than the old sata Samsung SSD I also have installed.

Kisai is correct and I can't boot off it.

My understanding is that my motherboard has 42 lanes to divide between my graphics card (Nvidia 1650 super) and the 4x card, and as far as I can tell I didn't take a graphics performance hit although I neglected to take all the benchmarks I could before hand.

HWInfi64 confirms the graphics card is still at 16x lanes.

Shadow of the tomb raider's score after install it's 47, which is a bit lower than the 60 a review site rates the card at but my system is likely processor bound. (6 cores at 99% utilization for the duration of the bench more or less).

Can I definitely say this was worthwhile? No. I probably would have been far better off saving the 45 dollars I spent for a new mobo+chip+etc upgrade that I much now desperately need. But it was a bit interesting to try at least I'll have a m.2 drive to throw in the rig when I do update.