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pcie lane question

illogik
Level 9
I am currently using the Maximus VIII Hero board which I believe has 20 pcie lanes. I am planning to buy a Samsung 512gb 960 Pro M.2 NVMe SSD in a couple of weeks when they are released. As far as I know, my single graphics card uses 16 pcie lanes and once installed, the 960 Pro will use the remaining 4 pcie lanes. The thing is I am also using an Asus Xonar D2X pcie sound card which is currently sat in a x4 pcie slot on my motherboard. So if the graphics card and ssd use all 20 lanes, what happens with the soundcard? Will it still work? Will the gfx card still run at x16 and the ssd at the full x4 while the soundcard is plugged in or does something need to be sacrificed for this setup to all work?
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7 REPLIES 7

Praz
Level 13
Hello

The CPU has 16 PCIe lanes. The 20 lanes you reference are from the PCH. Using the M.2 slot will have no impact on the available CPU PCIe lanes.

illogik
Level 9
Ah ok thanks. So in total there are 36 pcie lanes in my system?

Menthol
Level 14
yes there are but they don't share resources, the motherboard manual explains, first and second pcie x16 slots use lanes from CPU, M.2 and bottom x16 pcie slot use lanes from chipset, along with SATA and USB, etc.

Jagdseelen
Level 8
Wait a sec there are only 20 lanes all up. 16 are provided by the CPU and the remaining 4 are from the motherboard the are shared by the last PCIE slot and M.2 slot.

Jagdseelen wrote:
Wait a sec there are only 20 lanes all up. 16 are provided by the CPU and the remaining 4 are from the motherboard the are shared by the last PCIE slot and M.2 slot.

Hello

This is incorrect.

hiong
Level 8

illogik
Level 9
Thanks for the clarification guys 🙂