M.2 in PCIe Adapter

RichLan564

Bright Spark
Just looking down the line with my system and thinking about storage and working drives for video editing and was debating putting a PCIe M.2 adapter in there to give me another fast drive (the two M.2 slots on the motherboard are already populated) so i can move some stuff around to make things more logical

I see you can get M.2 PCie adapter cards mainly in PCIe x4 at the cheaper end, thing is i'm having a hard time understanding what my motherboard manual is telling me (X570-F Strix) is it saying if i have a GPU in the X16_1 slot then the Second and Third slots are not available if there is already two M.2 drive on the motherboard, or am i misunderstanding ?

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Martinr36

MOST VALUED CONTRIBUTOR
Well I'm reading that to say that anything that is plugged into any of the PCIe x16 slots will run at x8 (PCIe 4.0), and that both M.2 slots can support x4 (PCIe 4.0), so i'd say you would be fine with an adapter card
 

RichLan564

Bright Spark
Well I'm reading that to say that anything that is plugged into any of the PCIe x16 slots will run at x8 (PCIe 4.0), and that both M.2 slots can support x4 (PCIe 4.0), so i'd say you would be fine with an adapter card
Yeah, its a bit confusing to be honest as it looks like its saying if you plug into 16_2 it will drop the 16_1 to x8, which is exactly what you dont want as the GPU is in there?
 

Martinr36

MOST VALUED CONTRIBUTOR
Last edited:

RichLan564

Bright Spark
I'm actually tempted to give this a try as I've got a couple of spare M.2 kicking around in usb 3 caddies

Edit

Just ordered this one

Let me know how it goes

Only thing with that one is it isn’t held in by anything, I’m sure it will be fine but I was going to go this way


I saw another one that will do a M.2 NVME and a SATA one which would be handy as could get rid of mechanical drive and use M.2 SATA as bulk storage
 

Martinr36

MOST VALUED CONTRIBUTOR
Only thing with that one is it isn’t held in by anything, I’m sure it will be fine but I was going to go this way
Doesn't need it as only the height and bulk of a stick of RAM, It's due to arrive tomorrow so I'll let you know how it goes
 

RichLan564

Bright Spark
Doesn't need it as only the height and bulk of a stick of RAM, It's due to arrive tomorrow so I'll let you know how it goes
This one takes an NVME and 2xSATA which is probably the way I will go

 

DarTon

Well-known member
How do these impact the performance of the GPU/GPUs on an AMD X570 board? We've used adapters like these on Threadrippers at work but they have a lot more PCIe lanes to play with. I know on one of my old personal PCs, with a Maximus Ranger VII board, adding a PCIe adapter would technically halve the lanes for the GPU. The reality was GPU performance only actually dropped off marginally (like a few percent).
 

Martinr36

MOST VALUED CONTRIBUTOR
How do these impact the performance of the GPU/GPUs on an AMD X570 board? We've used adapters like these on Threadrippers at work but they have a lot more PCIe lanes to play with. I know on one of my old personal PCs, with a Maximus Ranger VII board, adding a PCIe adapter would technically halve the lanes for the GPU. The reality was GPU performance only actually dropped off marginally (like a few percent).
This is the results from the one i got with a 1TB PCS M.2 in it

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DarTon

Well-known member
@Martinr36. Thanks. I was actually more asking about the perfomance of the GPU i.e run Firestrike before and after putting in PCIe adapter and seeing if any real world difference. I would have thought no actual difference but I haven't checked it myself with an adapter in my new X570 machine.
 

Martinr36

MOST VALUED CONTRIBUTOR
@Martinr36. Thanks. I was actually more asking about the perfomance of the GPU i.e run Firestrike before and after putting in PCIe adapter and seeing if any real world difference. I would have thought no actual difference but I haven't checked it myself with an adapter in my new X570 machine.
@DarTon These are 4 most recent results, the top one is with the adapter in





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DarTon

Well-known member
@Martinr36. That's really useful. It backs up the view that at the margin it might just make a percent difference but, in reality, it has no real world impact.

That's what I expected/hoped for but wasn't certain since I haven't actually got a PCIe adapter for the new X570 personal PC. I've just been using the two motherboard M2 plus another M2 SSD in a caddy via USB-C.

Tempting me to buy that Asus one .... but then I'll need to buy the 4 x M2 SSDs to go in it!
 

Martinr36

MOST VALUED CONTRIBUTOR
@Martinr36. That's really useful. It backs up the view that at the margin it might just make a percent difference but, in reality, it has no real world impact.

That's what I expected/hoped for but wasn't certain since I haven't actually got a PCIe adapter for the new X570 personal PC. I've just been using the two motherboard M2 plus another M2 SSD in a caddy via USB-C.

Tempting me to buy that Asus one .... but then I'll need to buy the 4 x M2 SSDs to go in it!
yeah I've got a couple of M.2 caddies, but of course USB crucifies the speed even over USB C
 
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