Fastest M.2 on Z97 Board

[StipeP]

Hey fellas, 

can you help a less knowledgeable brother out? 

 

I live in a poorer part of the World so I can't afford to get the latest and greatest, so I'm just trying to upgrade what I have. 
I'm still stuck on i7 4770, which... works fine for my video editing workload. 

 

I'm thinking about upgrading from SATA SSD to M.2 or even NVMe. 

The current H81 board doesn't support it, but I found a cheap Asus Z97-C which does. 

 

I never understood those PCI lanes, and PCIe Generations so it's best to ask:

What are the max speeds and the fastest drives that I can install?

 

Thanks. 

 

PS. would upgrading to ROG MAXIMUS VII RANGER grant me anything significant over the regular Z97? 

[Fasauceome]

41 minutes ago, StipeP said:

What are the max speeds and the fastest drives that I can install?

 

The manual states that this board is in line with M.2 slots of the era, operating at PCIe X2. With just a GPU and M.2 installed, and no shared bandwidth with other PCIe devices, you should be getting 10Gb/s just fine. I recommend a less expensive NVMe SSD for this M.2 slot.

 

41 minutes ago, StipeP said:

would upgrading to ROG MAXIMUS VII RANGER grant me anything significant over the regular Z97? 

aside from the beefier VRM and some more features, not really. Asus budget Z97 boards are typically quite good for your average user, my Z97-AR overclocked like a champ and I stuffed it with devices which worked great.

[StipeP]

7 minutes ago, Fasauceome said:

The manual states that this board is in line with M.2 slots of the era, operating at PCIe X2.

 

Are you saying that, with the GPU only, I can get any one of these, and they'll run at max speeds on the Asus Z97? 

[Fasauceome]

5 minutes ago, StipeP said:

Are you saying that, with the GPU only, I can get any one of these, and they'll run at max speeds on the Asus Z97? 

they won't run at max speed, they'll only get PCIe x2 instead of x4. But for a Z97 motherboard, that is as good as it gets. In my personal experience, it didn't hamper the experience much because even with reduced bandwidth, the latency improvements on a faster drive can make a good difference.

 

Any of those but the SATA version would be fine. I don't believe the M.2 slots on Z97 boards are compatible with SATA SSDs.

[StipeP]

2 hours ago, Fasauceome said:

they won't run at max speed, they'll only get PCIe x2 instead of x4. But for a Z97 motherboard, that is as good as it gets. In my personal experience, it didn't hamper the experience much because even with reduced bandwidth, the latency improvements on a faster drive can make a good difference.

 

Any of those but the SATA version would be fine. I don't believe the M.2 slots on Z97 boards are compatible with SATA SSDs.

ok, so I need to look for PCIe x2 drives. Anything more and I'll be paying for the things that I can't use. 
Do they even make PCIe x2 drives any more or that's old tech too? 

[Fasauceome]

16 minutes ago, StipeP said:

so I need to look for PCIe x2 drives

no, the only version of NVMe drives that are made are PCIe x4

[StipeP]

16 minutes ago, Fasauceome said:

no, the only version of NVMe drives that are made are PCIe x4

Got it, and since my future board will have PCIe 2.0 which operates at x2 by default, the fastest that I can get will be 1GB/s? No matter which drive I go for. 

 

[Fasauceome]

14 minutes ago, StipeP said:

Got it, and since my future board will have PCIe 2.0 which operates at x2 by default, the fastest that I can get will be 1GB/s? No matter which drive I go for. 

 

I'm a little confused by the spec they listed, the motherboard manual states the M.2 slot is capable of 10Gb/s but one way or the other, you're only looking at a slightly slower NVMe drive than you otherwise would

[StipeP]

14 minutes ago, Fasauceome said:

I'm a little confused by the spec they listed, the motherboard manual states the M.2 slot is capable of 10Gb/s but one way or the other, you're only looking at a slightly slower NVMe drive than you otherwise would

OK, I'll give it a try. If it is slower, I'll get to keep it until the mobo+cpu upgrade when it should run at full potential

 

Thanks.