990fx extreme9 NMMe

mixsetup wrote: Hi there I am using the P1.80 Bios with this board the 990fx Extreme9. The Bios says it supports MVMe. In the manual of the board it says PCIe 2.0 x1 I was looking at buying one of these https://www.ple.com.au/Products/619408/Kingston-HyperX-Predator-PCIe-240GB-Gen2-x4-M2-with-HHHL-adapter- Now it says PCI Express 2.0 x4 is used for that PCIe NVMe So will this work and will I get the full benefit (speed) or will it just be slow and not really worth getting and buy another SSD instead?

First, this or any PCIe x4 interface SSD will not work in a PCIe 2.0 x1 slot.

You must use it in one of the PCIe 2.0 x16 slots. It will also use some of the PCIe lanes used by any video cards you use.

Also, although this SSD does use a PCIe interface, really an adapter card for an M.2 interface SSD, it actually is not an NVMe SSD. No where does Kingston say this SSD supports the NVMe protocol. It actually is one of the early PCIe SSDs that use a built in controller that uses an AHCI driver, like the early Samsung XP941 and AHCI version of the SM951. But definitely not NVMe.

https://www.kingston.com/us/ssd/consumer/shpm2280p2

You should be able to buy a Samsung 960 EVO NVMe SSD for about the same price, but it won't come with the M.2 to PCIe adapter card included with the Kingston. You can buy the adapters cards for less than $30 Australian dollars.

there was a slight clue in your first post though

you had doubts about is it worth it ?

it depends on what you do with it
options :

faster boot time ?  (doubt you would notice over a decent ssd)
faster gaming ? (several testers found no real difference over a decent ssd)
faster file transfers/ video encryptions (well yes but do you have anything else that can match it for speed ?)

you see the nvme is much faster indeed but ,does the rest of hardware match its bandwidth

its no good writing to a nvme card at 1800 mb when the source drive can only feed a max of 600mb
and vice versa tasking reading 3000mb from nvme and trying to write a ssd at 600ish mb

not trying to rain on your parade or anything just i detected doubts in your first post as to the hassle and value of getting the nvme into an older system

i run one now in my ryzen system (samsung evo960) and i must confess notice no difference to a phenom2 965 and samsung evo 850 system in regards to the hard drives performance

sure crystal diskmark says its better ,but do i notice it ? nope !

links for gaming tested
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIXSSOzyLbs
and gaming and boot test
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdF_aerWcW8


Edited by datonyb - 18 Sep 2017 at 7:14pm

mixsetup wrote: Thanks didn't notice that it didn't say NVMe as I was looking at this one also but it says PCI Express 3.0 x4 https://www.ple.com.au/Products/621061/Intel-750-Series-400GB-NVMe-PCIe-SSD-Retail-Pack

Yes, the Intel 750 (I have two of them) requires a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface for its full performance. PCIe 3.0 x4 is the current standard interface for PC NVMe SSDs, either in M.2 slots or in a PCIe slot.

Your 990FX board only provides PCIe 2.0, as all 990FX boards do. Any NVMe SSD that requires PCIe 3.0 x4 would lose some performance with any lesser interface, such as PCIe 2.0 x4.

Regarding performance of NVMe SSDs, the advantages they provide unfortunately are rarely used by most PC users. Plus we are stuck with a file system in Windows that was designed for HDDs, not for SSD "flash memory" storage.

If you use one or more SATA SSDs now, the difference in performance with typical tasks will be minimal with an NVMe SSD. If you work with many large files, or are constantly unzipping or compressing files, then an NVMe SSD will save time. But in general it's not like the difference going from HDDs to SSDs.