Christmas is looming and my other half has said to start thinking about what I would like to receive if I've been a good boy all year (so far I've kept the grass cut short and have done whatever DIY she's wanted so fingers crossed). Anyway I'm thinking about a Crucial C300 128GB SSD but I don't have native SATA III 6Gb support on my motherboard (Rampage II Gene), therefore the SSD would be bottlenecked to SATA II 3Gbs. So I'm also looking at buying a Rocket 620 with internal SATA III 6Gb connectors: http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/High...-v2-x1-to-SATA-6Gb-s-non-RAID-controller-card I have only one slot that can be used for an additional expansion card and that slot is a PCIe 2.0 x16 full length slot (my 5870 inhibits the use of the PCIe 2.0 x4 slot and I have a Pinnacle TV Tuner in the PCI slot). I've got a couple of questions in regards to this: 1) Will the Rocket 620 work in the PCIe 2.0 x16 slot? 2) If it does work then would it throttle my other PCIe 2.0 x16 slot that has the 5870? 3) Will an SSD installed on the Rocket 620 be bootable, i.e. will it be useable as a primary drive or would that still need to be a drive connected to the Rampage II Gene SATA II 3Gb ports? These maybe basic questions but its something that I've never really thought about before, having only ever used the PCIe slots for graphics cards. I've got an mATX form factor motherboard and case as I wanted to have my machine up on the desk instead of under the desk gathering more dust but most of all to give myself some leg room under my desk. I do not want to move back to a full sized tower (my previous case was a Coolermaster Cosmos thus the leg room problem under the desk). I don't have my motherboard manual with me as I'm working away from home this week. Many thanks in advance.
1) Yes, without question. An x16 slot will work with any PCI-E device of any size. It'll also work with any PCI-E 1.0 slot, though the bandwidth will be halved (PCI-E 2.0 has twice the bandwidth - and it's irrelevant for you as as both the x16 slots are 2.0 compliant). 2) No - your board has 36 pci-e lanes (i.e. max available bandwidth). With your motherboard, each slot has the maximum available number of lanes - your GPU has 16, the slot you want to install the rocket into has a maximum of 16, and the slot blocked by the GPU has 4 lanes (as it's an x4 slot). Generally speaking, some full sized ATX boards may have PCI-E x16 slots that can only supply x4 or x8 lanes - some also drop x16 to x8 if yusing SLI or Crossfire. Your board won't do that. 3) I assume yes - I've not used the Rocket, but the Asus U3S6 I have has two HDDs with XP and Win7 - I've got no other bootable drives and it works fine. As I've not used the Rocket, I'm sure someone from the Bit communtiy can confirm that for you
I've done what you are thinking of doing, ie C300 128gig and a rocket 620 into a non 6gig sata board. 1) As answered, works perfectly - It's how mine is connected. 2) As answered, nope. My 5870 works perfectly. 3) Yes, works perfectly as a bootable drive, again it's how mine is set up. There's nothing to it, plug it in and away you go. All you need to do is set up the C300 as the first bootable drive in the bios - The bios will see it as a hard drive. Best buys I have made in a long time.
Many thanks both for the information and I've made up my mind that this is what I'm hopefully going to buy. Now all I have to do is wait a couple of months to unwrap the wrapping paper and open the boxes.
