nvme(s) and GPU - PCI-e lanes?

[Nine Iron]

Bit of a quandary, here:

My 8350K has sixteen PCI-e 3.0 lanes available, four of which have gone to my existing nvme boot drive. I'm considering adding another nvme drive for storage - another four lanes - if I can bag it cheap enough, but I also want to add a GPU very soon.

Given that I will only ever go as far as, say, a GTX 1060 or other lower-midrange card, can I assume that it will run on eight PCI-e 3.0 lanes with no performance penalty relative to sixteen? I'm told that even the top-end cards can't saturate sixteen lanes...

Also, will the motherboard sort out the desired 1x8 + 2x4 lane splitting, or will I have to do that myself?

Many thanks!

9/I

 

[NeverBackDown]

Not sure which board you have but the second NVMe slot may not run off the CPU

However assuming it does, you are correct in that both will run x4 and the GPU will be running x8 which is more than enough for the 1050ti in your signature or the GTX 1060 you asked about.

 

[Nine Iron]

Well, that was timely - my offer on that nvme drive was accepted!

The board is a Z370N Wifi - the little ITX one - from Gigabyte. Two m.2 slots, one dedicated nvme, one nvme/SATA. Not sure how that relates to the chipset, but worst case my GPU will run at 8x and no difference will be seen.

 

[Bartacus]

You won't see a difference. We Ryzen adopters who have dual GPUs had the same question, since there are only 16 GPU lanes on X370 for both cards. x8 / x8 works just fine.

 

[Nine Iron]

Just remembered the other m.2 is on the BACK of the board - feck!

Board-out jobbie!