Extreme 7 using all 3 M.2's & front panel

I didn't think you could do it.  The MB book shows which ports share and are disabled when using one of them.  I have 2 M.2 cards and use the port not connected with those two.  I would like to add a 1TB Samsung 950 pro when they come out to compliment the 2 x 512 950's I have now but don't want to loose the front panel, which is way more convenient than the rear ones.  If anyone has info on how to use 3 x M.2 slots in the Extreme 7 and keep the front expansion panel, let us know.

Ok, front panel USB 3.1 bay mounted in the PC case, and connected to the SATA_EXP2 connector and SATA3_4 and SATA3_5. The USB 3.1 bay is also connected to a SATA power connector and a USB 2.0 header on the board.

PC booted and I'm using it now. The USB 3.1 front panel did not work with a USB 3.0 flash drive. The M.2 SSD in the M2_3 port is still recognized by Windows and works fine.

This is exactly as I suspected. The M.2 ports seem to have precedence over the other connections that share the same resources, one SATA Express and two Intel SATA III ports.

There is no way to select which connection/device(s) to use in the UEFI. That is, I cannot select the front panel USB 3.1 bay on the SATA Express 2 connection instead of the M2_3 port.

I don't know what will happen if, for example, the USB 3.1 front panel bay's SATA Express connector was connected, and the USB 3.1 panel was working, while the M2_3 port was empty. Later if an M.2 drive was connected to the M2_3 port, what would happen? Would the USB 3.1 bay disappear and the M.2 SSD be recognized?

IMO, the M.2 drive would be recognized and the USB 3.1 bay would disappear. I may be wrong since I have not tested this.

FYI, the USB 3.1 bay powered up but without data lane resources does not like to POST nicely. It takes a while for POST to give up on it and continue. That is one side effect, annoying but apparently not dangerous.

It would be nice if we could choose which shared connections we wanted to use, but that may be more difficult than it would seem to be.

Keep in mind we have added two additional interfaces (M.2 and SATA Express) on a mother board, while not removing any other interfaces (SATA ports). Also, the amount of IO resources has not increased much if at all. We would need three times the IO resources to have all of these interfaces active at the same time. ASRock may have given us the interfaces, but we are limited in how much of each one we can actually use by Intel.

UTRockHound wrote: Parsec - Thanks for running the test.    This thread is the one with the most Z170 Extreme 7+ MB owners i have yet seen on the interwebs.  Do you guys know of other places where owners share experiences?  I don't see a club on Overclockers or anywhere else.  I had issues at first posting that were RAM speed related.  I want to OC this machine but need to come up to speed.  I've been reading the Overclocker guide on Overclocker forums but it would be nice to see experiences with this board, 6700K etc.  I think the M.2 slots are going to bring people to this board but I just don't see critical mass anywhere. Thanks for the OT indulgence.

My pleasure running that test.

You missed the thread about using two or three Samsung 950 Pros in RAID 0 in this board.

Or the forum member here with the top single video card Firestrike scores using our board. He also has a CPU-Z validated 5.1GHz OC of his i7-6700K, again using this board.

IMO, this board is not perceived as a high end over clocking board, or a high end gaming board, by those two types of enthusiasts, extreme over clockers and gamers.

That is true IMO because the Z170 Extreme7+ has three M.2 ports.

Three M.2 ports are worthless when going after high over clocks. The same goes for gamers, many of which believe SSDs don't load games much faster than HDDs. Since M.2 SSDs don't provide higher FPS video game performance, what's the point of having three M.2 ports?

For SSD/IO enthusiasts like myself, this board is a dream come true. I can use three NVMe or AHCI M.2 SSDs at the same time, one or more as OS drives, or in RAID arrays, and a RAID array as the OS drive.

If I use only the integrated graphics (OMG!! ) I could have three Intel 750 NVMe SSDs in the PCIe slots, or other PCIe SSDs with M.2 to PCIe slot adapters.

If you want a club for this board only, this may be the best place for it.

I regularly run my memory at 3200 with this board, and at 3600 if I can endure a longer POST time for memory training.

Thank you everyone, especially Parsec,

Richard wrote:  I'd highly recommend putting it together yourself, as it's been great fun, and it becomes something you want to continue caring for...