B450M

Steven Rimmington

Steven Rimmington

Steven Rimmington

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Joined
6 Oct 2019
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594
Just a quick one and sorry if this has been covered before.

I bought an 512GB NVME M.2 Drive which I have fitted to the top slot on my MSI B450M Mortar Max.

I already had an 240GB WD Green M.2 drive so fitted this to the second slot. But it won't be seen in the Bios? Also had issues getting the bottom PCI-E slot to show a Wi-Fi card. Is this a limitation of the B450 chipset?

Just wondering what the second M.2 slot is for it I can't get an SSD to work in it?
 
M.2 is only physical form factor/connector standard.
Supported signaling standards vary all the way from PCI-express to SATA and even USB depending on motherboard and slot.

And while primary M.2 slot connected to CPU supports both PCIe (=NVMe) and SATA, that lower slot is connected to chipset...
Which supports only NVMe drives in that because of being short in I/O capability.
Also putting NVMe drive into second slot disables that only PCIe slot not made unusable by gaming graphics cards.
Because marketroids just couldn't be bothered to think and make it share I/O wiring with those two x1 slots, which are anyway unusable in gaming PC.

So while you can get both SSDs work by putting WD Green (bad choise to buy SATA drive in M.2 format instead of normal 2.5") into upper slot and NVMe drive into lower slot, there's no way to get Wifi-card work at same time.
 
From the specs page:

AMD® B450 Chipset
  • 4 x SATA 6Gb/s ports1
  • 1 x M.2 slots (M2_2, Key M)1
    • Supports PCIe 2.0 x4 2242/ 2260 /2280 storage devices
AMD® CPU
  • 1x M.2 slot (M2_1, Key M)1
    • Supports PCIe 3.0 x4 (1st, 2nd and 3rd Gen AMD Ryzen™/ Ryzen™ with Radeon™ Vega Graphics and 2nd Gen AMD Ryzen™ with Radeon™ Graphics) or PCIe 3.0 x2 (AMD® Athlon™ with Radeon™ Vega Graphics)and SATA 6Gb/s 2242/ 2260 /2280 storage devices
  1. PCI_E4 slot will be unavailable when an M.2 SSD is installed in the M2_2 slot.
 
Best case for attaching your devices would be

Leave the nvme drive in the top m.2 slot
wifi card in the second x1 down. If there's room under your graphics card.
Buy an adapter to install the sata m.2 drive in the bottom pcie slot. Leave the bottom m.2 slot empty.
 
I will buy a traditional sata SSD I think. It's proving difficult to install the secondary M.2 drive and will only work if the speeds are reduced in the Bios to X8 for the GPU? It was my old boot drive and the NVME type is much quicker so will leave this in the first M.2 slot. All confusing ha!!
 
Steven Rimmington said:
I think. It's proving difficult to install the secondary M.2 drive and will only work if the speeds are reduced in the Bios to X8 for the GPU?
Click to expand...

There aren't any slots on the board that share the x16 lanes from the cpu. And it shouldn't work at all in the bottom slot if it's a sata drive going by the specs. If it does, then that's a weird one.

But yeah, that's sensible. You'd probably want a larger capacity drive anyway for game installs. And your Graphics card will have room to breathe with the wifi card in the bottom slot.
 
pandem0nium said:
There aren't any slots on the board that share the x16 lanes from the cpu. And it shouldn't work at all in the bottom slot if it's a sata drive going by the specs. If it does, then that's a weird one.

But yeah, that's sensible. You'd probably want a larger capacity drive anyway for game installs. And your Graphics card will have room to breathe with the wifi card in the bottom slot.
Click to expand...

I have a mechanical 2TB drive and was going to use the 240GB for extra storage. I'll have to get rid then as I can't get it working :D Also probably try and go Ethernet as the WiFi card is a little in the way of the 5700XT. Joys of going for a MATX board I guess :)
 
If you have bottom PCIe x16 slot as well as graphics card you effectively disable the second M.2 slot. I think you have to go into bios to say which device you want.

wireless card in PCIe x16 seems to be a waste. However I am not sure if the x1 slots will even be available when the M.2_2 is occupied.

i have the same board and currently running 2 NVME drives on m.2 no issues.
 
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