pcie lanes?

[SparkyKoA]

will someone please help me better understand how pcie lanes work between the cpu and the mobo chipset, and how limited i am with what all i can plug into my mobo. i have a 6700k with a MSI - Z170A-G45 GAMING ATX LGA1151 Motherboard. i have a evga gtx 1070 hybrid and just ordered an m.2 ssd by crucail. is my gpu slot going to change to 8x? furthermore will i be able to do sli and have 2 m.2's? i have been researching all day and i am just not getting any clear answers. thank you for your time.

[Daniel Z.]

Anything over 8x PCIe gen 2 or 4x gen 3 should be good

[TheSLSAMG]

Any M.2 SSDs you're putting in that board should run off of the chipset's PCI-E lanes. The only negative is that a couple SATA ports would become disabled if you're populating both M.2 slots with drives. As for SLI, both GPUs would run at PCI-E 3.0 8x, which will not cause any noticeable bottlenecking. You should be fine.

 

That is, unless I'm misunderstanding how M.2 works on Z170. I read the motherboard's manual, and it only appeared that SATA ports were disabled as a result of running multiple NVME M.2 drives.

[unknownmiscreant]

1 minute ago, Daniel Z. said:

Anything over 8x PCIe gen 2 or 4x gen 3 should be good

4x gen 3 is a bit of a bottleneck at 32GB/s. You really need 64GB/s for high end cards/ 8x gen 3.

[SparkyKoA]

so how is it then that i can utilize more than the 16 pcie lanes? how does the chipset add the 20 lanes in a way that doesn't effect the other pcie slots?

 

[unknownmiscreant]

2 minutes ago, SparkyKoA said:

so how is it then that i can utilize more than the 16 pcie lanes? how does the chipset add the 20 lanes in a way that doesn't effect the other pcie slots?

 

It works like a USB hub, except for PCIe

[SparkyKoA]

ok, that makes more sense to me. thanks everyone!