ASUS® ROG STRIX X870-F - M.2 question.

[James29]

Hi,

Will installing two M.2's reduce the peformance of a 5080? as I understand it may not be best to populate slot 2 but will it really be noticeable? it will purely be for gaming.

Thank you.

 

[TonyCarter]

In short, no!

But there's more than 2 m.2 slots, and usually only one of them has an impact on the GPU slot - your motherboard will tell you which one(s).

But even then, a PCIe 5.0 slot running at only x4 has plenty of bandwidth to handle a 5080...even a 5090 can't fully saturate it.

 

[James29]

I see, I understand now, thank you

 

[TonyCarter]

According to the manual for that motherboard:

• M.2_2 shares bandwidth with PCIEx16(G5) (i.e. GPU slot). Wen M.2_2 is occupied PCIEx16(G5) will ran at x8 speed [this is the GPU PCIe slot]
• M.2_3 shares bandwidth with PCIEx16(G4). Wen M.2_3 is occupied PCIEx16(G4) will be disabled [this is the lower PCIe slot]

So you can either install your new SSD in the PCIe 4.0 M.2_3 slot and have the full bandwidth available to your GPU...or install it in the PCIe 5.0 M.2_2 slot and trust that there's plenty of bandwidth from the PCIe 5.0 slot for the 5080.