Asus Q170M-C m2 boot drive support.

theforce · 16 Feb 2023 at 22:38

A friend of mine has quite an old system, an i5 6600k with an Asus Q170M-C motherboard. The current OS drive is a 128GB Samsung 840 Pro which is relatively small by today's standards. Does anyone know if a PCIe to .nvme adaptor would work with this motherboard? In addition, would it be possible to boot from the .nvme drive or it can only be used as a secondary drive?

Thanks in advance.

LuckyBenski · 16 Feb 2023 at 23:29

I'd expect the storage to work for sure (assuming the PCIe lane arrangement works with any other cards - check the mobo manual)

In terms of booting, I believe Ivy Bridge was the last gen that didn't support NVMe boot, and Haswell did. So you should be safe on the following gen.

Tetras · 17 Feb 2023 at 00:26

In the bios manual there's a bit that says you can configure it to boot from pci-e expansion devices, so I'd hope that means nvme will work. You're planning to use the second full length slot, I assume?

theforce · 18 Mar 2023 at 23:41

Tetras said:
In the bios manual there's a bit that says you can configure it to boot from pci-e expansion devices, so I'd hope that means nvme will work. You're planning to use the second full length slot, I assume?

After some fiddling around in the BIOS, it showed the drive as bootable so l guess all is good. Unfortunately, l had to use the first full-length slot and move the GPU to the second full-length slot that is only running at 4x. The GPU is an Nvidia 1060 and is not used for gaming but only for Photoshop and Lightroom. Since the GPU is dual slot it covers the PCIe x1 slot just below the first full-length slot which is where the wifi/BT card resides now. He used to have that running on the second full-length PCIe slot. The scaling article you posted in the other thread seems to show that performance hit shouldn't be noticeable.

Hopefully, this will suffice until Windows 10 support expires.