Intel PCIE lanes

[HorrorCosmic]

So all this talk about pcie lanes got me thinking, i know it's really up to intel and the board manufacturer to dictate what lanes go and the thing that gets me is I know that the chipset has pcie lanes and most of those are for ethernet, sata, nvme, and so on but what really happens to the unused pcie lanes from the cpu?

 

Let's say i purchased one of the new intel Core i9 cpu's with 28 pcie lanes. I know those are mainly for graphics, but I only use 1 video card so that's 16 lanes being used out of 28. Is it possible to use the remaining 12 lanes for non graphics related expansion cards? something like NVME ssd? Is it possible to completely avoid pch and just use the intel pcie lanes?

 

Also same question for amd even though i mentioned intel.

[Mira Yurizaki]

For X99 the NVMe path did go to the CPU's PCIe lanes. Probably so you can do an x8/x8/x8 configuration. So the same thing most likely holds true here.

 

Otherwise most of the PCIe lanes in a CPU route to x16 slots on the board. So if you want to use those for something else, you can... With an expansion card

 

[HorrorCosmic]

3 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

For X99 the NVMe path did go to the CPU's PCIe lanes. Probably so you can do an x8/x8/x8 configuration. So the same thing most likely holds true here.

 

Otherwise most of the PCIe lanes in a CPU route to x16 slots on the board. So if you want to use those for something else, you can... With an expansion card

 

Ok so they are hard wired (so to speak) to the pcie x16 slots on the board?

 

[Mira Yurizaki]

15 minutes ago, HorrorCosmic said:

Ok so they are hard wired (so to speak) to the pcie x16 slots on the board?

 

Yes. But not all PCIe x16 slots may be attached to the CPU. You need to confirm with your motherboard's manual.