Asus Prime Z790-P: Performance of M2 Drives

[Vonsworld]

Hi

I'd like to add some M2 SSD drives to this Asus Prime Z790-P Motherboard for maximum performance.

It has three M2 slots. It appears from the manual that slot 1 is connected directly to the CPU, but that slots 2 & 3 are managed by the Z790 chipset.

Therefore will the performance of the M2 drives in slots 2 & 3 be noticeably slower?

I plan on buying a very fast M2 Drive for slot 1, but is it worth spending the same amount on slot 2 or 3 if performance will be slower?

Thanks
Robin

 

[Tetras]

Therefore will the performance of the M2 drives in slots 2 & 3 be noticeably slower?

Theoretically the latency will be slightly higher and if they were all hammered at the same time you might encounter a bottleneck due to the limited uplink between the CPU and the chipset, but realistically it is not something I'd worry about.

I plan on buying a very fast M2 Drive for slot 1, but is it worth spending the same amount on slot 2 or 3 if performance will be slower?

If you will actually need the speed for your workload, sure (though very few workloads are meaningfully bottlenecked by the speed of your SSD), but if you don't need it: no.

If you were only using the additional drives for secondary storage, for example (like games and backups), there's little point in buying a very fast drive for that.