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Prime Z690-P D4 - Can I use a PCIe x8 10Gb NIC without losing lanes for the GPU

eighty1
Level 7

I have a Z690 motherboard with a 3070ti in the primary PCIe slot. Would I be able to add something like an Intel X520-DA2 NIC in another slot without issue? I'm building a 10Gb network for lab and NAS stuff, and having the full 10Gb available from an SFP+ port on the NIC would be optimal. The documentation doesn't make it too clear since I'm not installing another GPU, but I assume that if I drop in an x8 part like the aforementioned NIC, that it would run at x4, which wouldn't be optimal. Thanks.

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4 REPLIES 4

Silent_Scone
Super Moderator

Hello,

The Z790-P D4 utilises Chipset lanes for all PCIE expansion slots besides PCIEX16(G5) as per the manual. The GPU will remain at 16x with the NIC installed

9800X3D / 6400 CAS32 / ROG X870 Crosshair / TUF RTX 4090

What about the 690?

Murph_9000
Level 14

The Intel X520-DA2 is not a great choice for use on a desktop platform because it's a PCIe 2.0 card.  Desktop systems are very limited in the number of their PCIe lanes compared to servers or workstations (the intended platforms for that card).  The PRIME Z690-P D4 only has x4 chipset slots available (other than it's GPU slot), so the card will never be able to run in x8 mode.  PCIe 2.0 x4 would just about be sufficient for twin 10Gbit NICs (it's 5Gbit per lane), but it would be pushing the limits of the PCIe bandwidth and might slightly limit their performance; if the card supports running in a x4 slot.  The additional slots are physically x16, but only wired for x4 (or x1).  In general, you won't find secondary x8 slots on desktop platform boards, other than those where the slots split the GPU bandwidth into x8/x8.  PCIe 4.0 x8 would generally be sufficient for a 3070Ti in most cases for general gaming; GPUs don't take full advantage of the x16 bandwidth other than at the top end or with very specific workloads.

You really need to look for a x4 card; dual interface would be possible on a PCIe 3.0 x4 card if you need that.  Server/workstation cards can often be sub-optimal on desktop platforms.  If a single port would be sufficient, you could use one of the ASUS cards: XG-C100C or XG-C100F.

This is great info. I think the XG-C100F would work for my use case. Thanks.