Motherboards Z97 XPOWER AC, PCIE Lanes, PLX Chip, Multi GPU and NVME questions

Hi

A question if you don't mind.

I currently have a Z97 XPOWER AC matched to a 4790k with a single 980 GTX.

I know the motherboard has this extra PLX chip that allows some multiplex options on the PCIE lanes.

My question is that if I goto a 980 GTX x2 setup and then want to add an NVME M2 lump of storage ala Samsung MZ-V5P512BW 950 Pro am I going to be wasting my money because I wont have enough bandwidth to fully take advantage of the speed the storage is capable of in the M2?

I know if I had a Skylake build I wouldn't have to worry

Cheers

Kosch

 

It all depends on how many lanes your PLX chip will allow dude. With Skylake the lanes come down to the board (apparently) so again that would all depend on board.

FWIW I am running two Fury X and a X4 SSD (RAIDR) in my rig and my cards are running X8 X8 and I get pretty much bang on what I would for such a set up when I look at reviews of FX CFX.

Apparently -

"The Z97 XPOWER AC comes with a PLX-chip to enable 4-Way SLI / CrossFire. However, in the case you only use just one VGA card, the PLX chip may cause some latency. This is why the Z97 XPOWER AC comes with a dedicated PCI-E x16 slot which is directly connected to the CPU bypassing the PLX chip giving you the best possible performance when using only 1 VGA card."


If it runs Quad SLI (edit for the pedants, that should be 4 way SLI, Quad SLI is two dual GPU cards) then you can bet your onions it will do SLI and a M2 with its eyes closed dude.

 

They will have absolutely no effect on each other, as the m.2 port on your motherboard connects via 2x pcie 2.0 lanes, not the pcie 3.0 lanes.

Yeah, so the only effect of putting a m.2 SSD in will be to make two of the SATA ports unusable - as that's what the lanes are otherwise used for.

Obviously this notably limits the max performance - as the total bandwidth is only 10Gbps (vs a 4x pcie 3.0 m.2 slot with 32Gbps) - but that's all that your board can do.

 

Thanks both for the valuable input. +rep for you both!

 

No prob's - though it seems a little strange to give us both rep when Vault-Tec's answer was incorrect.

Well, the info you needed had nothing at all to do with the PLX chip &, given what you were clearly asking about (re m.2 speeds), it wasn't remotely useful to say that it'll do "m.2 with its eyes closed".

That said, maybe i'm just in an odd mood today since, whilst i'm really not a fan of the 'everyone must have prizes' culture, i didn't answer for the rep anyway; just to be helpful.

 

+ rep for you! :d

 

nvm

 

What an amazing put down - boy have i been told.

Okay, so admittedly you're correct that *if* their board had used pcie3 lanes for m.2 then there'd have been no issue with getting a 950 to work at full speeds with that the OP was proposing...

...but you would have been equally correct if you'd written that *if* it was grey, had 4 legs & a trunk, it might pass for an elephant - & neither answer would have been practically helpful to them in answering the actual question as to whether the SSD would work on their board at full speed.

 

Why are you determined to be obnoxious enough to start an argument? What belligerency.

But to answer your smarmy post - I was trying to help the guy, hence rep. So I got it wrong, wow you love that don't you?

Happy now?