M.2 drives drops 980 Ti to PCIe 3.0 8x

[voodoodrul]

Due to a lack of lanes on this Z97 board, the M.2 drive drops my one and only PCIe 3.0 x16 to x8. I know that this should have almost zero impact on gaming performance, but is there any reason to care that the GPU is running on half the lanes?

 

[railven]

Due to a lack of lanes on this Z97 board, the M.2 drive drops my one and only PCIe 3.0 x16 to x8. I know that this should have almost zero impact on gaming performance, but is there any reason to care that the GPU is running on half the lanes?

Just saw this article that answers this:

http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/pci_express_scaling_game_performance_analysis_review,17.html

Single card Gaming versus generational different PCIe slots

As the article has shown, if you use a single high-end graphics card then really, even the PCIe Gen 1.1 slot would be sufficient. Gen 2.0 is preferred and Gen 3.0 only brings in a marginal improvement. Pretty much everybody anno 2015 is on PCIe Gen 2.0 though, so if you are worried that performance is cut in half due to that faster PCIe Gen 3.0 slot, then think again in a modest 2 to 3% percent on average.

If you look at the charts, 8x PCIE3.0 == 16x PCIE 2.0

So you are barely losing anything noticeable.

 

[fixbsod]

2-8% ? the ssd will boost overall performance much more than any potential loss