PCI Lane Bottleneck?

[EDSman11]

So here's my situation. I'm trying to add some additional SSD storage to a small form factor build I have. For simplicity purposes, I would really like to go with an M.2 drive and the crazy price drops on NVMe have made them look like a pretty good option at this point. The question I have is whether or not I will be posing a bandwidth limitation due to the number of PCI-e lanes I have available.

 

Heres my build atm:

 

- i5 6600k

- Gigabyte GTX 1070

- TP-Link Archer T9E PCI-e Network Adapter (x1)

- Samsung 850 EVO 500 GB 2.5" SSD

- MSI Z170 Board

 

I've been looking at adding an Adata XPG SX8200 480 GB NVMe SSD seeing as its a steal at $109 (especially given the fact that there's only a $3 difference between it and the 500 GB M.2 860 EVO). But will I be limiting its throughput seeing that I only have 20 PCI lanes on the Z170 chipset?

 

Thanks for the help!

[Chronified]

You have even less than 20 lanes, Intel site says you've only got 16 lanes with the 6600k. 

https://www.intel.ca/content/www/ca/en/products/processors/core/i5-processors/i5-6600k.html

 

Since you've already got that x1 network adapter you're already bumping your GPU down to x8 speeds, so you've got 7 lanes to play with.

Grab an x4 PCIe-M.2 adapter such as this and you're good to go!

[DocSwag]

You should be fine b/c the CPU has 16 lanes on top of the 20 from the chipset. Those 16 are dedicated to the pcie slots for add in cards. The wifi adapter might use up 1 of those lanes which would force the GPU to x8 but even if it was in x8 that would impact performance by 1% at most.

 

If you want, you could save $20-$30 though and grab a 500gb MX500 m.2 SSD. It's SATA so it won't use up any lanes though that part shouldn't matter.

1 minute ago, Chronified said:

You have even less than 20 lanes, Intel site says you've only got 16 lanes with the 6600k. 

https://www.intel.ca/content/www/ca/en/products/processors/core/i5-processors/i5-6600k.html

 

Since you've already got that x1 network adapter you're already bumping your GPU down to x8 speeds, so you've got 7 lanes to play with.

Grab an x4 PCIe-M.2 adapter and you're good to go!

The lanes from the ssd should go into the chipset which has 20 lanes on top of the 16 from the CPU.

[EDSman11]

1 minute ago, Chronified said:

You have even less than 20 lanes, Intel site says you've only got 16 lanes with the 6600k. 

https://www.intel.ca/content/www/ca/en/products/processors/core/i5-processors/i5-6600k.html

 

Since you've already got that x1 network adapter you're already bumping your GPU down to x8 speeds, so you've got 7 lanes to play with.

Grab an x4 PCIe-M.2 adapter and you're good to go!

Really? I was looking at this thread from toms hardware where they said that the SSD occupies chipset PCI-e lanes. Is that incorrect?

 

Either way running the GPU at x8 isn't a huge deal in terms of performance anyways right? The only thing I wanted to make sure of is that I didn't have to do any allocations of lanes myself in terms of making sure the SSD was given the full x4 to work with.

[Chronified]

1 hour ago, EDSman11 said:

Really? I was looking at this thread from toms hardware where they said that the SSD occupies chipset PCI-e lanes. Is that incorrect?

 

Either way running the GPU at x8 isn't a huge deal in terms of performance anyways right? The only thing I wanted to make sure of is that I didn't have to do any allocations of lanes myself in terms of making sure the SSD was given the full x4 to work with.

Whoops, I didn't realize the 6600k was that recent.

I was thinking it was pre-m.2 and would require a PCIe addin card.

 

Outside of this box:

Would it be viable for you to switch to USB networking? That x1 wifi card is making your gpu drop to x8 

[EDSman11]

2 minutes ago, Chronified said:

Outside of this box:

Would it be viable for you to switch to USB networking? That x1 wifi card is making your gpu drop to x8 

I had USB Networking previously and wasn't very happy with the throughput, although it probably wasn't the highest end USB adapter (Netgear AC1200). I have gigabit network speeds at my university so I wanted to get the best throughput possible.

 

But now that I think about it I'm actually hardwired the majority of the time nowadays anyway so I may actually just pull the wifi card out when I go to install the new SSD. That would solve all the problems I guess lol.

[airdeano]

59 minutes ago, Chronified said:

Outside of this box:

Would it be viable for you to switch to USB networking? That x1 wifi card is making your gpu drop to x8 

not to be dramatic, but the x1 slots are controlled from the chipset. so the scenario of the GPU dropping to x8, because the NIC is occupying the x1 slot is in error: