Not familiar with the BIOS of the hero but in the Extreme when Install it in a PCIE adaptor you need to set the speed of the PCIE slot that is going to the PCH controller to X4 instead of leaving it in auto or it will run X2. Again, not sure if this applies to the Hero but I would think it does.
HeroVIII wrote:
No matter how much you leave it in Auto or x4, in Maximus Hero VIII there is no difference of performance nor speed of Windows startup, works perfect.
May not be any difference is start up but a performance hit is pretty much guaranteed. Regardless there is no arguement to be made to leave an X4 device to change itself when the setting is there specifically to make it X4.
Just went through the hero manual and verified all the settings are the same as other Maximus boards related to this specific set up. Page 3-34 specifially states that auto results in x2 mode that will revert to X1 if you are using any of the x1 slots as they share bandwidth. Earlier in the manual is says that when you populate slot 4 the x1 slots are disabled so there is conflicting info in the manual. :confused:
This has been shown to happen across multiple Z170 platforms resulting in reduced bandwidth, there is another recent post here with half speeds on a hero that was resolved by going to X4 instead of auto. Launch Samsung magician and it will show you what speed its configured as. To get half speed or thereabouts on PCIE 4 is 100% of the time a result of running x2 or it running at Gen 2 speed. There are multiple posts across multiple boards with the exact same issue that was resolved by putting the bandwidth setting of PCIE4 to X4 instead of auto. I had the exact same problem on an M8E that was just as simple as selecting X4.
If you have experienced differently then please post up configuration and benchmark results so we can decide which parts of the manual are accurate and which are not.:cool:
