Z790 Advice

[LambChop]

There's no major rush right now as there's no stock of either board I'm going to discuss, but here's my issue...quick sanity check please..

I have purchsed a 4090 card, and I've been waiting on the Asus Z790 Hero, but from what I can see when this board has a 4090 plugged up its covering the 2nd pcie slot so the hyper extension card will have to go in the bottom slot as you look at the board. I have an Essence STXII soundcard so I will need it in that slot, so to confirm, I'm screwed then as I want Gen 5 nvme speeds when those ssd's hit and there's not an onboard gen 5 m2 slot, right ?

So I was thinking of the MSI MEG z790 Ace, which I believe out of their 5x m2 slots, 1 of them is gen 5 ? So that leaves me with that final bottom slot for my sound card ?

 

[Tetras]

It looks like the Z790 Hero can only have a PCI-E 5.0 SSD by using the second PCI-E slot, because then the CPU divides the GPU PCI-E lanes by 2 and the Hyper M.2 can grab them for one PCI-E 5.0 M.2 slot. So, I believe you're correct that if a 4090 covers up that slot then you're out of luck.

The Z790 ACE does a sort of similar thing, it wires up the second PCI-E slot to have 8 of the 16 PCI-E 5.0 CPU lanes for the graphics card, but unlike the Z790 Hero, it has a switch on M.2 slot 4, so that it can take the lanes from the PCI-E slot 2, to use for a PCI-E 5.0 M.2 SSD.

Funnily enough, it is easier to do this with AM5, because they have 4 PCI-E 5.0 lanes permanently set aside from the CPU for an M.2 SSD, so even a 'cheap' board like the B650-PLUS TUF has a PCI-E 5.0 M.2 SSD and a free PCI-E at the bottom for your sound card.

The ASRock PG Riptide Z790 is one of the cheaper boards with a PCI-E 5.0 M.2 slot.

 

[LambChop]

It looks like the Z790 Hero can only have a PCI-E 5.0 SSD by using the second PCI-E slot, because then the CPU divides the GPU PCI-E lanes by 2 and the Hyper M.2 can grab them for one PCI-E 5.0 M.2 slot. So, I believe you're correct that if a 4090 covers up that slot then you're out of luck.

The Z790 ACE does a sort of similar thing, it wires up the second PCI-E slot to have 8 of the 16 PCI-E 5.0 CPU lanes for the graphics card, but unlike the Z790 Hero, it has a switch on M.2 slot 4, so that it can take the lanes from the PCI-E slot 2, to use for a PCI-E 5.0 M.2 SSD.

Funnily enough, it is easier to do this with AM5, because they have 4 PCI-E 5.0 lanes permanently set aside from the CPU for an M.2 SSD, so even a 'cheap' board like the B650-PLUS TUF has a PCI-E 5.0 M.2 SSD and a free PCI-E at the bottom for your sound card.

The ASRock PG Riptide Z790 is one of the cheaper boards with a PCI-E 5.0 M.2 slot.

Perfect, thank-you.

The Meg it is then, just looking at the MSI config, it looks like everything will work out fine, of course gen 5 gpu at x8 is meh, ideally x16 would be better but there's going to be no concerning difference and its the same speed as gen 4 x16 so all is good.

Weird, Asus have made a bit of a boo boo imho. Maybe they dont expect anyone to have a separate sound card these days, or any Audiophile to use their computer, but its their soundcard so they ought to know. Anyway, ty for the response.