X870e with the fastest post times ? 4x nvme support with 16x gpu

That lowers the PCI-E version but doesn't narrow the lane width as far as I know. OP definitely has an issue somewhere to get x4 on the GPU.

4 nvme's will impact the gpu speed 100% 7000 series has (28 lanes total) 24 usable lanes with a further 4 reserved for chipset link, 16 from the cpu are wired to the x16 slot and 4 more go to the gen 5 slot for the top most m.2, the chipset handles the rest with usb and lan functions, all of which take bandwidth, the more drives you use it will split the available lanes which will impact gpu and even some m.2's will run at slower speeds, in addition most of your sata ports will be disabled and some usb may not work with 4 drives and a gpu in use.

that’s where Threadripper is required, most of the lineup have over 64 pcie lanes which is very hard to use even with all of the above, everything will run at full speed with no issues on Threadripper

enabling memory context restore and changing the memory divider in the bios to 1:1 will help no end with boot times, take it from 1-2m each time to well under 30 seconds to get to windows from power up
 
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4 nvme's will impact the gpu speed 100% 7000 series has (28 lanes total) 24 usable lanes with a further 4 reserved for chipset link, 16 from the cpu are wired to the x16 slot and 4 more go to the gen 5 slot for the top most m.2, the chipset handles the rest with usb and lan functions, all of which take bandwidth, the more drives you use it will split the available lanes which will impact gpu and even some m.2's will run at slower speeds, in addition most of your sata ports will be disabled and some usb may not work with 4 drives and a gpu in use.

that’s where Threadripper is required, most of the lineup have over 64 pcie lanes which is very hard to use even with all of the above, everything will run at full speed with no issues on Threadripper
From what I can see in the board's manual, if OP is running 4x M.2 slots, then the graphics should still have the full 16 lanes available.

Regular AM5 CPUs have 16x 5.0 lanes from the CPU for graphics, 4x 5.0 for M.2 and an additional 4x 5.0 lanes for general purpose (or secondary M.2).

X670E boards can do 2x M.2 direct from the CPU without any GPU lane sharing. Most X870/X870E boards stole the 4 general purpose lanes for USB4, so they can only do 1x CPU connected M.2 slot.

X670E boards have 2x southbridge chips and plenty of PCI-E 4.0/3.0 lanes (I think it is something like 8x PCI-E 4.0, 4x SATA or 4x PCI-E 3.0, per chipset?), but no 5.0 lanes.

The chipsets can provide 2x M.2 slots without a big issue, but they do often share with SATA ports (the OP's TUF board does). The M.2 slots won't run at noticeably slower speeds, unless they saturate the uplink bandwidth, which they might in a system that's running compute-intensive stuff like a Threadripper would.

USB is impacted on boards with USB4, but I'm not aware of it being generally impacted for lower specs.
 
I don't know if I'm misunderstanding you, but that's not correct?

A lot of AMD boards will do 3x M.2 and a full 16 lane for graphics, even lower-end B650/B850 ones.

The board you currently own (like many X670E boards) can support up to 4x M.2 slots.

If your graphics card is running at only 4 lane, the problem is something else and it should be fixable:



Also, to be clear, you can't spend your way out of the lane/bandwidth restrictions. It doesn't matter if the board is £1000 or £150, they're subject to the same CPU/chipset limitations, though it is true that they can configure it differently.

X870/X870E motherboards in particular, are more likely to have issues with their M.2 slots than older X670/X670E boards, due to the presence of USB4.
Yeah so on my board when I occupy all 2 there is no penalty, add 3 drops to 8x and 4 down to 4x. This is because 3 are from the cpu and 1 from the chipset, how its allocated is 16x for gpu 4x for usb 4 and 4x for the nvme add more nvmes they steal from the gpu, this makes the 24 lands for the cpu then you have 20 from the chipset on x870e.

Looking at the asus ones they will use 3 from cpu and 2 from the chipsetso if I run 3 drives I should have no penalty.
 
for context my am5 system with 96gb of ram takes around 18-19 seconds to boot call it 20 or 21 just to be safe [i have stop watched it but in a very un exact science way so hence me giving an extra second or two to be safe]
thats on a sapphire b850 board 7800x3d and 2x48gb corsair 6000 cl30
first boot [around about 2 weeks ago give or take an hour ive had this pc running 2 weeks today] the first boot took 3 or 4 minutes at most because of hte memory training and after i enabled expo i think i had to let it do the same memory training on next boot but since then that 20 21 seconds or less has been hte rule must have booted her up 30 times or more since then
not sure how much this is helpfull probably not but thought it was worth mentioning
Yeah thats a lot faster then mine with more ram
 
From what I can see in the board's manual, if OP is running 4x M.2 slots, then the graphics should still have the full 16 lanes available.

Regular AM5 CPUs have 16x 5.0 lanes from the CPU for graphics, 4x 5.0 for M.2 and an additional 4x 5.0 lanes for general purpose (or secondary M.2).

X670E boards can do 2x M.2 direct from the CPU without any GPU lane sharing. Most X870/X870E boards stole the 4 general purpose lanes for USB4, so they can only do 1x CPU connected M.2 slot.

X670E boards have 2x southbridge chips and plenty of PCI-E 4.0/3.0 lanes (I think it is something like 8x PCI-E 4.0, 4x SATA or 4x PCI-E 3.0, per chipset?), but no 5.0 lanes.

The chipsets can provide 2x M.2 slots without a big issue, but they do often share with SATA ports (the OP's TUF board does). The M.2 slots won't run at noticeably slower speeds, unless they saturate the uplink bandwidth, which they might in a system that's running compute-intensive stuff like a Threadripper would.

USB is impacted on boards with USB4, but I'm not aware of it being generally impacted for lower specs.
I also have 4 sata hdds aswell sorry forgot to mention that 2x 16tb and 2x5tb
 
If you just need a load of NVMe and don’t care about absolute performance which you are not getting anyway on a bandwidth constrained desktop board you can do what I do and use an NVMe add in card with a MUX chip, I don’t need full speed, I just have a lot of NVMe from various upgrades etc as I need more space, I pop the old in this device and have a large storage space, it can take 8x NVMe and you can use them as you wish, the interface is pcie 4 x8 max (might actually be x16, no manual, no specs, random OEM box Chinese buy :D ) so that would be the absolute max bandwidth you can get on/off the card, I actually have mine in a gen4 x2 slot, fast enough for my needs so I don’t mess with GPU bandwidth but still have an array of disks I can dump stuff on much faster than SATA.

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Yeah so on my board when I occupy all 2 there is no penalty, add 3 drops to 8x and 4 down to 4x. This is because 3 are from the cpu and 1 from the chipset, how its allocated is 16x for gpu 4x for usb 4 and 4x for the nvme add more nvmes they steal from the gpu, this makes the 24 lands for the cpu then you have 20 from the chipset on x870e.

Looking at the asus ones they will use 3 from cpu and 2 from the chipsetso if I run 3 drives I should have no penalty.
Not being funny, but the board in your OP must be a typo/wrong, there's no USB4 on the TUF Gaming X670E and it only has 2x CPU connected M.2 slots.

The Asus boards you mention, if you only use 1x CPU and 2x chipset, yeah, probably be alright (not sure about SATA sharing), but if you use any combination of 2x CPU connected slots, I expect your GPU will be knocked down to 8 lane. Would need the board model to confirm.
 
If you just need a load of NVMe and don’t care about absolute performance which you are not getting anyway on a bandwidth constrained desktop board you can do what I do and use an NVMe add in card with a MUX chip, I don’t need full speed, I just have a lot of NVMe from various upgrades etc as I need more space, I pop the old in this device and have a large storage space, it can take 8x NVMe and you can use them as you wish, the interface is pcie 4 x8 max (might actually be x16, no manual, no specs, random OEM box Chinese buy :D ) so that would be the absolute max bandwidth you can get on/off the card, I actually have mine in a gen4 x2 slot, fast enough for my needs so I don’t mess with GPU bandwidth but still have an array of disks I can dump stuff on much faster than SATA.

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Now, that looks very handy. I know you said there is no documentation, but do you if/how those pair of mini SAS connectors work? I’m assuming they could possibly break out 8 lans each.
 
I have nothing to test that, I would assume they work and that is what it would do, the box says the card is Gen4 x16, so I guess you would get 2x 8i interfaces, I got the impression they were alternate inputs to PCIe. There are probably far cheaper cards that do that though if you don’t need the PEX chip as you can just get a simple interface card.

It works well though, some quotes from seller suggested if I had more that 4 drives it would switch to 2 lanes per M2 but actually if I test the drives independently I get full speeds from them with more than 4 mounted, which is better than I expected.

The only issue I have with it is unlike the QNAP it replaced it does not have Heat Sink and Fan to cool M2s so I have to find something to do this as things get well toasty, board has fan headers though which I have tested and work fine so it is just a case of finding a decent solution to attach to them.

The PEX chip itself is quite takes some power and is toasty but it has its own HSF which is not at all noisy and didn't seem to ramp up with testing, though without coolers I couldn't do extensive tests.
 
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I have 4 nvme and a 9070xt all at their full speed on a MSI Tomahawk 870e - boot times are around 20 seconds - i have disabled some of the rear USB-C ports to max the speed of one of the NVMEs though
 
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