M.2 Slots ROG STRIX Z690-F GAMING WIFI

[-Draino-]

The user manual is a little confusing as to what slots to use if I am going to install 2 M.2 cards. Clearly I use M1 for the first card but where does the second one go? Is it 1 and 3 or 2 and 4, or does it matter. M1 will be a 500GB boot drive and the other will be a 1TB storage drive.

[JohnAb]

All of your M.2 slots support Gen 4 drives, so it won't really matter. Just fill them up as you wish. Might be logical to put your boot drive in M2_1 though, just so you can easily remember which one it is.

Just note that if you put a SATA M.2 drive (as opposed to an NVME drive) in slot 4, then your conventional SATA port G_2 will be disabled. Finally, the bandwidth from your lower PCIe slot is shared between with M.2 slots 2-4. Hence if you use any of those, you won't get 16x on the the lower x16 PCIe (G3) slot. If your GPU goes in the top x16 G5 slot anyway, you don't need to worry (unless you have some sort of other high bandwidth card you were planning on putting there).

So, I would put your boot drive in M.2_1 and your storage in M.2_2. Simples!

[-Draino-]

JohnAb wrote:
All of your M.2 slots support Gen 4 drives, so it won't really matter. Just fill them up as you wish. Might be logical to put your boot drive in M2_1 though, just so you can easily remember which one it is.

Just note that if you put a SATA M.2 drive (as opposed to an NVME drive) in slot 4, then your conventional SATA port G_2 will be disabled. Finally, the bandwidth from your lower PCIe slot is shared between with M.2 slots 2-4. Hence if you use any of those, you won't get 16x on the the lower x16 PCIe (G3) slot. If your GPU goes in the top x16 G5 slot anyway, you don't need to worry (unless you have some sort of other high bandwidth card you were planning on putting there).

So, I would put your boot drive in M.2_1 and your storage in M.2_2. Simples!

Thank You!!