Z97M OC Formula PCIe 3.0 use

I know the Samsung SSD SM951 needs an adapter to go from M.2 to PCIe 3.0 because this motherboard's M.2 port will strangle the 951's data flow(AHCi or NVMe). I have looked at the spec sheet for board but can't deduce whether there are enough PCIe 3.0 channels for the PowerColor Radeon R9 285 2GB TurboDuo Video Card and the Samsung SM951(128GB) to be slotted in and to work at thier maximum potentials. 

Basic reality first, all the PCIe 3.0 lanes on a Z97 board, or any other Intel 9, 8, and 7 series chipset board are provided by the processor.

Next, all the Intel processors that you can use in a Z97 board, or the others mentioned above, provide 16 PCIe 3.0 lanes. The X99 and X79 platforms provide more PCIe 3.0 lanes.

Given the way the PCIe 3.0 lanes are allocated, as soon as you use two cards that use PCIe 3.0 lanes, even if only one lane was used by one of the cards, the video card will get eight PCIe 3.0 lanes.

The same is true in your case. If an M.2 slot uses two or four PCIe 3.0 lanes, the video card will be allocated eight PCIe 3.0 lanes.

The general consensus and reality of video cards using PCIe 3.0 lanes, is that eight lanes will not limit the performance of any current video card. You R9 285 is not a high end card, so will definitely not be limited by being allocated eight PCIe 3.0 lanes.

Your board only has two PCIe 3.0 slots, PCIE1 and PCIE3. Video card should be in PCIE1, the SM951's adapter card in PCIE3.

And as an afterthought, I should be getting those 2K read and 1.4K write speeds?(the SM951 will  be OS hard drive.)

Over clocking the CPU or not does not change the amount of PCIe 3.0 lanes provided by the CPU.

I would not suggest over clocking using the BCLK when using an SM951, they are sensitive to the PCIe buss speed and need it to be very close to 100MHz.

The specs of the different capacity SM951s are somewhat different.


Capacity    Read            Write

128GB       2050MBs     600MBs

256GB       2150MBs     1200MBs

512GB       2150MBs     1500MBs

http://www.storagereview.com/samsung_sm951_pcie_m2_ssd_review

I just read that the read/write speed tests were performed on PCIe 3.0 x4 lanes so x8 is obviously more than enough to maximize the SM951- AHCi or NVMe. YAY! bring on the 3D XPoint