Hero XI Wifi - NVME and Sata Help

[Bladehawk]

So I'm planning to get a ROG hero XI Wifi board and wanted to make sure of how many SATA channels I'd have open.

 

I'll have 2 M.2 PCIe NVMe drives in a raid 0 and 1 mechanical HDD. The machine will also have a 5 bay cage (with one slot taken by aforementioned HDD).

 

With this load out and 2 video cards will I have 5 SATA channels open for drives (the MB has 6)?

Will the 2 M.2 drives run at full speed?  I was told the bottom slot would share bandwidth and slow down my m.2 drives if I install anything there.

 

I can still upgrade to the MSI MEG Godlike, but it seems like overkill, is expensive and has and too few USB ports (I've also never heard of the audio company making the chips).  I'm good with networking, but I know very little about motherboards.

 

[Jurrunio]

8 minutes ago, Bladehawk said:

With this load out and 2 video cards will I have 5 SATA channels open for drives (the MB has 6)?

no. While I'm not sure on whether using 1 NVMe SSD will lose ports, using 2 will definitely cost you a SATA port or two. They are connected to the chipset nonetheless, as Intel CPUs will spend all the lanes to satisfy GPU's needs.

 

Depends on whether your NVMe SSDs (in RAID 0) is capable of using PCIe 3.0 x4 bandwidth completely. If yes, then yes, and vice versa.

 

Not sure if Godlike lose SATA ports with 2 NVMe SSDs, but the same SSD on chipset issue doesnt change since they are all Z390.

[Bladehawk]

It looks like the original spec I found for Godlike was off. it only has 6 SATA rather than 10)  so that doesn't change.  I'm 99% sure that the NVMe cards are all x4.  I was worried about the dual video cards being 8x rather than 16x (godlike doesn't really qualify if they go to 8x with dual cards like ROG does).  Thankfully Linus has a video and it's within margins of error so not worth worrying about.

 

I've gotten conflicting info from people at my PC builder and I even talked to ASUS.  They started talking about sharing bandwidth with other PCIe devices. I think they were referring to the PCIe slot at the bottom, which will be empty for me so it won't use bandwidth.

 

The chips are supposed to be configured as PCIe rather than SATA, but I'm not really sure if that means in terms of channels, multipliers and the like, Since one of the M.2 slots can be either one it's fairly confusing.

 

 

[LinusOnLine]

On the Crosshair Hero VII it is the M.2 slot with a heatsink that shares PCI lanes so your so your graphic card goes down to 8x. The lower  M.2 slot has its own direct lane to the CPU but no heat sink. Have no idea why they have done it that way and people are very confused by it  

I wonder if it is the same for the Crosshair hero VI?

[Bladehawk]

I'll be running two graphics cards as well.  Will the godlike have the same issue?