ASRock.com Homepage
Forum Home Forum Home > Technical Support > Intel Motherboards
  New Posts New Posts RSS Feed - SM951 on Z97M Fatal1ty Motherboard
  FAQ FAQ  Forum Search Search  Events   Register Register  Login Login

SM951 on Z97M Fatal1ty Motherboard

 Post Reply Post Reply Page  <12
Author
Message
schickenipple View Drop Down
Newbie
Newbie
Avatar

Joined: 24 Jun 2015
Status: Offline
Points: 8
Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote schickenipple Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 02 Jul 2015 at 4:46am
This is all great information, Parsec, thank you. 

I can see how 'compatibility' could mean different things to different people... I definitely made an assumption that the compatibility list equated to the drive being bootable as well but I think that assumption is quite reasonable. 

The drive is indeed compatible as a storage drive as long as a SATA disk is used as the primary boot. A nasty side effect of this is that the UEFI is unusable until you remove the SM951 as it is treated as a graphics card, forcing a black screen with an unmovable mouse cursor in the middle.

I benchmarked the card (as the D: drive in Windows 8.1) and the results were less than staggering due to the PCIe x2 limitation you mentioned before. Seq. Read = 488 MB/s, Seq. Write = 750 MB/s. I thought it strange that the write was faster in this case.

I just couldn't justify using this drive with such marginal gains over the much cheaper Samsung 850 EVO drive (over 500 MB/s read/write) using the SATA 6 GB/s interface. 

What would happen if I ran (2) 850 EVO drives in RAID 0? Is the 6 GB/s speed limitation per interface or a controller bandwidth limitation?

Thanks again for your observations and attention to detail. 


Edited by schickenipple - 02 Jul 2015 at 4:48am
Back to Top
 Post Reply Post Reply Page  <12
  Share Topic   

Forum Jump Forum Permissions View Drop Down

Forum Software by Web Wiz Forums® version 12.04
Copyright ©2001-2021 Web Wiz Ltd.

This page was generated in 0.156 seconds.