M. 2 on Asus 170 pro gaming

Sorry for repeat thread guys. Posted in memory forum by.mistake and couldn't delete it or it. Please delete or close thread there foum mods. Again sorry.

Basically I'm looking if some of you genius guys could give me some help. What it is...

I have a Asus 170 PRO gaming motherboard. From what I read on the manual and going by what I find online the M.2 slot disables the SATA 1 port yes? Also the board has 16 PCIE lanes? Anyhow this is where I get lost.

I was thinking on purchasing a 512GB Samsung SM951 but I'm unsure on what way it will affect me. Is it that because my board has 16 lanes, this M.2 drive will share some of my PCIE lanes? e.g. 8 lanes to my GPU (Asus 970) and 8 to my M.2 drive? or am I getting mixed up and slightly lost? I know the SM951 is supposed to be a rapid fast drive and would like it to run as full speed but I also don't want it to affect my graphics card too. If anyone can shed some light on this for me it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance

p.s in case it matters here is my spec (currently not built but is sitting here)
Asus 170 PRO Gaming
i7 6700k
32gb G.Skill 3000mhz
Asus FTW+ 970
512 Samsung Evo SSD
3TB + 5TB 7200rpm drives

Can anyone help?

The i7 6700K supports 20 PCIe lanes. My understanding is that when the computer starts up it allocates those PCIe lanes to the devices on the PCIe bus. In your case you have a 970 on the bus and will then have the M.2 drive. The M.2 runs on 4x lanes and the 970 will take the remaining 16x lanes. That totals 20 lanes so you should have no issue with available throughput.

To take your question further. If you were to add another graphics card in SLI for example the M.2 would take 4x lanes and the GPUs would take 8x each, again totalling 20x. The data throughput of PCIe 3.0 is so fast that this doesn't actually bottleneck anything on the GPUs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rctaLgK5stA

A 6700K has 20 lanes.

Basically all you care about is can you use m.2 and 2way SLI/Crossfire at 8X/8X or single GFX at 16X and the answer is yes.

Even if SATA#1 is disabled somehow, that still leaves 5 SATA ports for normal HDD/DVD etc.

stulid said:

A 6700K has 20 lanes.

Basically all you care about is can you use m.2 and 2way SLI/Crossfire at 8X/8X or single GFX at 16X and the answer is yes.

Even if SATA#1 is disabled somehow, that still leaves 5 SATA ports for normal HDD/DVD etc.

Click to expand...

SATA#1 is only disabled if the port is ran in SATA Mode (as per the manual), which it won't be in his case as it's not a SATA M.2 drive. Seems to be a common misconception with the interface and the devices people are actually purchasing.

Atleast you know a 6700K has 20lanes now

It's early...and it's still not enough

Thanks guys, that has cleared up some info for me. I k ow the book says it disables sata port 1 but was unsure what way it works requiring pcie lanes or of they affected them at all. But thanks for all your inputs guys. For now I've filled all 6 sata ports so the m.2 drive may wait to I can combine a few smaller drives to bigger.

stulid said:

Atleast you know a 6700K has 20lanes now

Click to expand...

No, the 6700K has 16 lanes which are assigned to GPU. Additional lanes are then provided by the chipset for other motherboard devices and slots. In the case of Z170 this is an additional 20 PCI-E 3.0 lanes. Other chipsets provide less.