Asrock 990 FX killer with Samsung SM951

avantage 97o performance vs 990 ...?????

NONSENS.....

net2paul wrote: U need to create a Windows 10 USB installation media with UEFI support (GPT) Booting directly from USB . Ahci mode in UEFI and only SM951 connected, no other drive.  Installing a bootable Win10 on it.  How to create a Windows 10 USB installation media with UEFI support: http://www.windowscentral.com/how-create-windows-10-usb-installation

I've been using Windows installations on Intel systems for years by installing it from a USB flash drive with UEFI support. I've done that with Windows 7, 8, 8.1, and 10. The first board I did that on was an ASRock Z77 Extreme4.

I do this with standard SATA SSDs, and AHCI SM951s. My ASRock Z170 Extreme7+ board has two AHCI SM951s in RAID 0, that is the drive volume shown in my Disk Management picture. Since some users are posting benchmark results, here's some of mine of the RAID 0 OS volume:







The USB Windows 10 installation media I used with my Fatal1ty 970 Performance/3.1 is the same one I've used to install it on three different Intel systems. I've never had a problem installing Windows this way until I tried it on my AMD board.

You did not mention one thing that is essential for the system to really be UEFI/EFI booting. That is an option in our board's UEFI that must be set a certain way. That option is...

With that option set in my Fatal1ty 970 Performance/3.1 board's UEFI, the target SSD for the Windows installation is never seen by the Windows installer. That is the issue I have.

aberdeen wrote: avantage 97o performance vs 990 ...?????

net2paul wrote: aberdeen wrote: avantage 97o performance vs 990 ...????? YES

net2paul is correct. That is simply because the M.2 port on the Fatal1ty 970 Performance is PCIe 2.0 x4, while the Fatal1ty 990FX Killer's M.2 port is PCIe 2.0 x2.

The difference between these two boards is not because of the chipset (990 vs 970) but simply due to the PCIe 2.0 lane allocation to the M.2 port.

As we know, the SM951 has a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface. So not providing that to this SSD will result in reduced performance. Using PCIe 2.0 x4 will not allow the SM951 to perform at its best, and using PCIe 2.0 x2 will result in a further reduction in performance, sorry to say.

A single SM951 in a PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 port looks like this:




The Fatal1ty 990FX Killer board was released in April, 2014. That was before the SM951 and XP941 were available.

The only M.2 SSDs available at that time, if they even were available, were SATA M.2 SSDs. The PCIe 2.0 x2 M.2 interface was mainly designed for SATA M.2 SSDs, and is more than enough to allow them to perform at their best.

The Fatal1ty 970 Performance was released in November, 2014, and by then the Samsung XP941 was known to be coming. The XP941 uses a PCIe 2.0 x4 interface, so the M.2 port on the 970 Performance was changed to PCIe 2.0 x4.

Don't you hate how fast some PC components change sometimes...