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Z790-E and M.2 drive slots

JC1018
Level 7

Hi,

This is my first post here. I am also building my first pc. I will be using it to run Photoshop and Lightroom for photography.

I have the Z790-E, i9-13900k CPU, ROG STRIX4070 Ti, GPU and two sticks of WD SN850X 4TB M.2 Drives.

I know that the GPU goes in the top PCIe slot to utilize 16x lanes.  

My question is which slots should I put my 2 M.2 drives in for best performance?

Thank you for any help and advice. I am VERY pc illiterate. I have watched several suggested youtube videos, but still highly confused.

 Image (7).jpg

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Accepted Solutions

cekeu
Level 12

If you do not want to lose the x16 capacity of the bandwidth of the pci-e x16 slot of the graphics card and if you do not configure the 2 ssds in Raid 0 or 1 put the one on which you will install the system in slot M .2_2 and the other in M.2_3. If you don't care if the graphics card slot bandwidth goes x8 put the ssds in M.2_1 and M.2_2

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cekeu
Level 12

If you do not want to lose the x16 capacity of the bandwidth of the pci-e x16 slot of the graphics card and if you do not configure the 2 ssds in Raid 0 or 1 put the one on which you will install the system in slot M .2_2 and the other in M.2_3. If you don't care if the graphics card slot bandwidth goes x8 put the ssds in M.2_1 and M.2_2

Thank you very much for your help. I appreciate it!

Thanks for your feedback

a lil confused, so based on manual, for Z790 Maximus Hero there is no shared bandwidth between GPU and M.2_1 slot or they do share it but run full speed?

Screenshot 2023-07-01 025652.png

you saw well. on maximus hero the bandwidth is shared between pcie x16 G5 slots 1 and 2

RogueSix
Level 9

I would just like to add that for your second drive whether you put it in M2_3, M2_4 or M2_5 does not really matter. Put it where you want to. The only thing you might have to pay attention to when putting the drive in the M2_5 slot is that it runs in NVMe mode and not in SATA mode but the board should usually autodetect the NVMe drive so no manual intervention is needed.

I personally have three NVMe SSDs plugged into this board. My Windows 11 OS drive is in the M2_2 slot and the other two are in M2_4 and M2_5. The lower slots usually run a bit cooler so you might want to consider that or, as said above, just put them in the most convenient slot for you, e.g. maybe you don't want to have to remove your graphics card to reach a certain M2 slot.