X99

spyknee wrote: ty I'm good, was asking before installing vid driver. Everything was like pulling teeth for clean install of w7. x99 Taichi  fw 1.4 i76850 HyperX 3000MHz  OCZ RD400 GTX1070G1 next question.  the RD400 is running hot, hotest component by 10C. It sits in M.2 slot closest to cpu, in vid card air exhaust. It has OS installed. Can I move it as is to the 2nd M.2 slot and boot machine, so far its the only drive installed? and whats with the super slow POST and having to press TAB key to boot ?

You can use the RD400 in either M.2 slot, makes no difference for booting an OS.

I have an RD400, and they do run on the warm side, that's normal. If mine is below 40C, it must be cold in the house, and it's not even the OS drive. All M.2 SSDs run warmer than SATA SSDs, and the RD400 run about 4C - 5C warmer than a Samsung 950 Pro. These M.2 SSDs have no metal case to act as a heat sink, so they will be warmer. You can put a small heat sink like those used for video cards on the VRM chips, on the SSD controller chip, the one closest to the gold contacts on the circuit board. The SSD controller is what runs hot, and what the temperature reading you get is from.

If you had the version of the RD400 with the M.2 to PCIe slot adapter card, it would run a little cooler, but not 10C cooler.

Super slow POST? Yes, welcome to X99! A lot more going on with an X99 board, more SATA ports, more PCIe lanes, more memory slots, dual network ports, WiFi, etc. Slowest board to POST I've ever used, but that is normal. One more thing too, NVMe drives take longer to POST on any mother board. Try having more than one on a board, takes even longer.

The need to press TAB to boot is not normal. Have you set the boot order in the UEFI? You may see multiple entries for the same drive, which one is first?

spyknee wrote: Question i7 6850 if I use an M.2 SSD in the M2 1 slot, a vid card in pcie slot2, will the ssd drive pcie lanes step on the vid card lanes, ssd 4 lanes video 16 lanes................

The i7-6850K has 40 PCIe 3.0 lanes:

http://ark.intel.com/products/94188/Intel-Core-i7-6850K-Processor-15M-Cache-up-to-3_80-GHz

So there is more than enough PCIe 3.0 lanes available for video cards and other devices.

Beyond that, it depends on the specific X99 board you will be using, and how it allocates the PCIe lanes for the M.2 slot. All X99 boards are not the same, and you did not mention which X99 board you will be using.

All you need to do is understand the PCIe lane allocation to the PCIe slots and the M.2 slot, and use the appropriate slots. You should have no problem running a video card at PCIe 3.0 x16, with an M.2 SSD (also unknown to us) at PCIe 3.0 x4.

Knowing which X99 board you will be using will allow us to determine which PCIe slot to use for a video card to run at x16.