Plan on building a new PC. Have a question regarding M.2

[Lriya]

Budget (including currency): 3-4k

Country: U.S

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Unknown, just a gamer, sometimes I record.

Other details (existing parts lists, whether any peripherals are needed, what you're upgrading from, when you're going to buy, what resolution and refresh rate you want to play at, etc): PC Part Picker

 

So far, this list is what I have. I do plan on overclocking my CPU which is one of the reasons why I'm going 420mm cooling. I don't have any listed for GPU/MOBO/CPU. I would go for a 13900k and a 4080. However, I do plan on getting those parts since I will be buying these later within next year. So perhaps news of the 5080, or 15900k etc might become available.

My question regarding the M.2. I am still pretty new to PC building, I only had built maybe 3 PC's so far. (Mine & for 2 friends). I'd say I'm still new though. Within my part list, I am planning on going with 3 M.2's as my drives. No Hard drives, or SSD's. One of the M.2's will be one of the new Gen 5? I hear they are fast and I plan on using that for my main windows and other important game/stuff . The other 2 are 980's which will be for other games, or whatnot.

Question is, with the newer motherboards now. Do I still need to keep SATA ports unplugged for M.2's? Such as, If using M.2_1 on the motherboard, I have to keep SATA 1 free. etc. So for installing 3 M.2's, I have to keep SATA 1,2,3 free while 4,5,6 is plugged in?

Thanks for any answers. For reference, I'll probably go with this board: MOBO

 

[CyberneticTitan]

Regarding the Gen 5 NVMe I'd say pass it. People can barely tell between Gen 3 and Gen 4 NVMes and this will be more the case with Gen 5 NVMe. Further there is a pretty big difference between current top-of-the-line Gen 4 drives and the first wave. Unless money is no issue you will feel pretty stupid spending $160 USD on a Gen 5 NVMe that doesn't even hit the bus limit (T700 can only get around 12GB/s seq when bus limit is around 14-15).

[RONOTHAN##]

8 minutes ago, Lriya said:

One of the M.2's will be one of the new Gen 5? I hear they are fast and I plan on using that for my main windows and other important game/stuff .

Entirely pointless, for that there's barely any benefit for anything better than a good SATA drive, let alone a Gen 3 M.2. Getting one of these is entirely pointless unless you are doing something professional like massive databases or things like that. Plus if you're using a Gen 5 SSD on an LGA 1700 board like you seem to be planning on doing, in order to get the Gen 5 M.2 slot you have got steal PCIe lanes from the GPU, resulting in worse gaming performance (not by much, but still) than if you had just left that slot unplugged. 

 

10 minutes ago, Lriya said:

Do I still need to keep SATA ports unplugged for M.2's?

No? Even when sharing SATA ports with M.2s was a thing, it was only ever 1-2 SATA ports being shared (usually the bottom 2) and only ever for one M.2 slot, and it is very much dependent on the board for whether that happens. 

[Eigenvektor]

1 hour ago, Lriya said:

Within my part list, I am planning on going with 3 M.2's as my drives. No Hard drives, or SSD's. One of the M.2's will be one of the new Gen 5?

As others have said, there's no point in buying a Gen5 NVMe SSD at this point in time. I've got both a PCIe 4.0 and PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSD. There's no noticeable difference in day to day tasks, despite a difference of 3.5 GB/s vs 7 GB/s.

 

I've moved my games onto the newer NVMe SSD and there's virtually no difference for the large majority of them in terms of load times. For a lot of things I can't even tell the difference when comparing it to my older SATA SSD, which only has 550 MB/s.

 

You'll only need such fast drives if you have a use case that involves moving a ton of data between equally fast drives. Keep in mind that even 10 Gbps network tops out around 1.250 MB/s, so less than half as fast as a Gen3 SSD.

 

1 hour ago, Lriya said:

Question is, with the newer motherboards now. Do I still need to keep SATA ports unplugged for M.2's? Such as, If using M.2_1 on the motherboard, I have to keep SATA 1 free. etc. So for installing 3 M.2's, I have to keep SATA 1,2,3 free while 4,5,6 is plugged in?

Check the specs or manual of the motherboard you've selected. It will tell you if certain ports conflict with one another. Here: https://rog.asus.com/motherboards/rog-strix/rog-strix-z790-e-gaming-wifi-model/spec/

This is the limit I could find:

** When M.2_1 is occupied with SSD device, PCIEX16(G5) will run x8 only.

 

So your GPU will be limited to a x8 connection if you use the M.2_1 port.

[Khushav]

2 hours ago, Lriya said:

Budget (including currency): 3-4k

Country: U.S

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Unknown, just a gamer, sometimes I record.

Other details (existing parts lists, whether any peripherals are needed, what you're upgrading from, when you're going to buy, what resolution and refresh rate you want to play at, etc): PC Part Picker

 

So far, this list is what I have. I do plan on overclocking my CPU which is one of the reasons why I'm going 420mm cooling. I don't have any listed for GPU/MOBO/CPU. I would go for a 13900k and a 4080. However, I do plan on getting those parts since I will be buying these later within next year. So perhaps news of the 5080, or 15900k etc might become available.

My question regarding the M.2. I am still pretty new to PC building, I only had built maybe 3 PC's so far. (Mine & for 2 friends). I'd say I'm still new though. Within my part list, I am planning on going with 3 M.2's as my drives. No Hard drives, or SSD's. One of the M.2's will be one of the new Gen 5? I hear they are fast and I plan on using that for my main windows and other important game/stuff . The other 2 are 980's which will be for other games, or whatnot.

Question is, with the newer motherboards now. Do I still need to keep SATA ports unplugged for M.2's? Such as, If using M.2_1 on the motherboard, I have to keep SATA 1 free. etc. So for installing 3 M.2's, I have to keep SATA 1,2,3 free while 4,5,6 is plugged in?

Thanks for any answers. For reference, I'll probably go with this board: MOBO

 

See as u asked if u have to keep the respective sata ports free, there is no need u can absolutely use all your sata ports irrespective of the m.2