Asrock Z77 Extreme4 PCIe lane question

[Owls]

I'm using a Z77 with dual nVidia GPUs and I would like to add a Sata controller (LSI 9211). My question is would I be able to squeeze it in between the GPUs and if I could would it hamper the GPU performance for running out of PCIe lanes?

I couldn't find a clear answer in the manual. Thanks in advance.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

In theory, yes. In practice, no.

If you place an expansion board in one of the slots driven by the CPU, both will only get an 8x connection. But since PCIe 3.0 8x has the same transfer capacity as a PCIe 2.0 16x, you're not going to notice any difference. Even PCIe 2.0 8x is enough for any current graphics card.

The above assumes you have a PCIe 3.0 compatible graphics card. If your graphics card is only PCIe 2.0 compatible, then you're limited to a PCIe 2.0 8x connection. But again it should not matter, unless you run GPGPU workloads.

Hope that explains.

 

[Owls]

Got it thank you. I also just realized I only have 2 PCIe 8x slots anyway and the LSI 9211 is an 8x card so I have nowhere to install it anyway. Too bad all the 1x PCIe cards are garbage as I'm out of Sata 3 ports on the motherboard now.