Another skylake board help

Humate

Humate

Humate

Associate
Joined
23 Dec 2005
Posts
652
Hi all,

Im having trouble settling on which skylake board to buy. Theres so many different storage connectors/options at the moment and I greedily want them all for some level of future proofing. I want to find the perfect board for:

-USB3.1 and thunderbolt 3 over type C
-Dual Sli or crossfire
-M.2 ssD (and maybe U.2?)
-and space for a RAID controller that runs on PCIe x8

I had settled on the gigabyte gaming 7 until i read:
* The PCIEX4 slot shares bandwidth with the M2H_32G connector. The PCIEX4 slot will become unavailable when an SSD is installed in the M2H_32G connector.

Therefore dual sli or crossfire, m.2 ssd and PCIe raid controller clearly wont all work on this board.

This leaves me with a few questions which I hope someone can help me with

QUESTION1 - Do M.2 slots always render other PCIe slots defunct or running in slower mode?
QUESTION 2 - Then I read about U.2 SSDs and I greedily wanted that also. I dont know whether I need it as I did read somewhere you can get m.2 to u.2 adapters. Do these adapters give full U.2 functionality over m.2 or do things run slower or something?
QUESTION 3 - What do people think about thunderbolt 3... will thunderbolt ever take off as there arent many boards currently supporting it built in and its limiting my board options.

Other options I have considered were:
asrock extreme 7+ (but no thunderbolt or U.2),
asus maximus hero Viii (again no thunderbolt and i dont know if the m.2 ports kill a PCIe slot as is the case for the gigabyte).

For all this connectivity maybe I need to be looking at much higher end boards such as gigabyte gaming G1 or asus maximus Viii extreme. This makes me uneasy though as i would rather not spend £300 on a mobo and leads me to the conclusion that my quest for a more storage friendly future proof mobo is born out of my own greed than neccessity.

Hopefully someone can help restore balance to my z170 mobo quest.

Thanks for your help !!
 
Question 1: In many cases (Since the M.2 relies on PCI-E lanes) adding a M.2 drive will result in less lanes being available for the PCI-E slots on the motherboard. If you are going to use numerous lanes then you are probably better buying a Haswell-E CPU and LGA 2011-3 motherboard. Because Skylake has less lanes than the higher-end Haswell-E options nearly all boards will result in slower running PCI-E slots if an M.2 drive is used at full capacity.
Question 2: Yes, aslong as there are enough PCI-E lanes available to run the drive then it will work at full capacity.
Question 3: Unless you have serious plans to use the Thunderbolt 3 port I wouldn't bother. In my opinion I doubt it will be anything widely used as it seems to be the same hype surrounding each Thunderbolt release :D

Hope I could help and good luck with your Skylake based build :)
 
Thanks TechMinerUK, that info is really helpful.

Im stuck with skylake now as I have my 6600k already.

I read skylake has 16 lanes on cpu and 20 lanes on chipset. Bit annoying that the m.2 on gigabytes gaming 7 disables the third PCIe x4 slot. I guess they used up all the remaining lanes for other features.
 
Humate said:
I have one last question as I have never had an m.2 drive. If u look at board layout on asus maximus viii hero:
https://www.asus.com/uk/Motherboards/MAXIMUS-VIII-HERO/

If u run dual graphics does the m.2 drive being so thin fit under the second graphics card or would longer m.2 drives clash with it?
Click to expand...
Yes, they are not much larger than a blank PCB so they will fit under the GPU no problem as long as they don't have any strange heat sinks on (Haven't seen any that do yet but you never know ;))
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom