1151 motherboard with 2 x M.2

Ish · 8 Nov 2019 at 21:57

Hi

Can you please recommend me a motherboard to use with a i9-990KF which won't be overclocked.

The important thing is that it needs to have 2 x M.2 slots which will allow 2 x
Seagate FireCuda 510 2TB drives to run at full speed.

The cheaper the better!

pastymuncher · 9 Nov 2019 at 13:25

I believe all the Z390 boards that have a pair of M2 slots run them at full speed but you will lose some sata or pci-e slots. My board is running a pair of NVME drives at full speed and I have lost four sata ports if I remember right. It doesn't matter to me as I have nothing that uses sata now that I have gone NVME only but someone with a few drives will find it a problem. It would be a good idea to either get a board with a pair of heatsinks for the M2 drives or buy the heatsinks seperately because these drives can get hot and throttle partly due to the terrible positioning on the motherboard (usually under the gpu cooler and between the gpu and cpu).

***Update*** It varies from board to board and the cheaper ones do not run both M2 slots at full speed.

Ish · 9 Nov 2019 at 23:46

Thanks for the advice on the heatsinks. I've gone for the ASUS Prime Z390-P board.

pastymuncher · 10 Nov 2019 at 14:45

@Ish Not a good choice and that's not a board I would have chosen for a 9900. Going for a cheap board is a false economy and rarely makes any sense, especially when pairing it with a power hungry cpu.

It states in the description on OCUK's website:-

2x M.2 (PCIe 3.0 x2 & SATA; 2242 / 2260 / 2280)

. That didn't seem right so I went to Asus website to check and found this:-

1 x M.2 Socket 3, with M key, type 2242/2260/2280 storage devices support (SATA & PCIE 3.0 x 4 mode)*1
1 x M.2 Socket 3, with M Key, type 2242/2260/2280 storage devices support (SATA & PCIE 3.0 x 2 mode)

The first one runs at full speed and the second at half speed. It took me all of two minutes to find that out so always double check. Cancel that order before it ships and pick a better board. Pick a board that you like the look of and read the description then double check on the manufacturers website.