M.2 nVME (& GPU questions)

[dxm55]

Hello there LTT-ers,

Hope you're all doing well. I've got a couple of questions with regards to the title.

I've an Aorus 3080 Master and it's a chonky boy. The M2A slot is already taken up a Gen 4 nVME boot drive, and I want to add another nVME to the M2B slot. 

1) If I decide to go budget and get a Gen 3 nVME, will it affect the speeds of my GPU and boot nVME, both of which are running Gen 4? 
I've set Gen 4 in the BIOS, so would this affect detecting the Gen 3? Or if i set it to AUTO in the BIOS, will this then slow down all the devices to the Gen 3 nVME, which would now be the lowest common denominator?

2) The M2B is sat directly under that fat GPU which takes up nearly 4 slots. Even under the mobo heatspreader, would it overheat?


 

[Nathanpete]

1. Depends on your motherboard, but unless you are running threadripper or (I think) X299, then your lower M.2 slot is already limited to Gen 3 speeds, so there is absolutely no problem. This is because the bottom M.2 slot is usually connected to the chipset rather than the CPU, so it uses a totally different bus, meaning that changing the generation setting in your UEFI shouldn't even affect it. 

Also, it will not cause any detection issues, and your best bet would be to keep the PCIe gen speed setting in your UEFI set to Gen 4. This will not cause any issues as far as I can tell. 

 

2. No it won't overheat. Sure it will get hotter than normal, but not overheat, degrade performance (by a noticeable amount), or cause damage. Nothing to worry about as long as you take the plastic off of the thermal putty on the M.2 heatsink, assuming you have one. If you don't than you may see a drop in performance, but that is it.