M.2 on Asus 170 Pro Gaming

MODS: Please move to Motherboard forum, posted here by mistake. Sorry




Hey everyone, I hope this is in the right section, apologies if its not.

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

I'm no expert buddy I think since using M.2 disables SATA 1 then it's not using any PCIE lanes at all. Otherwise connecting SSD to SATA 1 would affect GPU speed too since it should all share the same bandwidth

SM951 is a PCIE M.2 device, therefore it requires 4x lanes to operate. The 6700K has 16 lanes in total, which means yes, your GPU will run at 8x in this configuration. You aren't operating the port in SATA mode as it is not a SATA M.2 device.