ASUS Hyper M.2 X16 PCIe 4.0 X4 Expansion Card Supports 4 NVMe M.2 (2242/2260/2280/22110) up to 256Gbps for AMD 3rd Ryzen sTRX40, AM4 Socket and Intel VROC NVMe Raid

I'm cracking up at these post. First know your motherboard, second, know your processor, 3rd...If you are confused and just want geek of it, skip the next paragraph, since I'm taking this time to explain, I.. took the time ... The next paragraph just sets the stage..Sigh. First, if you're old school, then you know that when win2k came out in preview, it didn't even boot Athelons. If you're really old school, then you remember in the i386 to i486 days, Intel came out with I486 chip defining the standard, and AMD came out with a socket adapter to put their proc in? Not to mention, Dell didn't even sell AMDs until circa 2006? BAM - Aug 2006 press release later that year they would. Now this is before Lenovo was even sold in the US, and HP was the top of the line, Compaq was a joke. Stage set? Okay, AMD burned, will never touch them again. Burn through 1,000 hours of your life troubleshooting AMD isn't developed on, so the difference in the architecture is fatal, 10,000AMD hours later, would you still touch them? Yeah, yeah, I can still tell the difference in the pauses and hesitations running Windows. That being said...Gen10 Intel has 40 total PCIE GEN3 lanes, that's TOTAL,not available, and UPTO 30 for HSIO or PCI-HIGH SPEED AKA PCH. Get used to seeing PCH lanes, they are any PCIE lanes and the Z4xx COMETLAKE PCIE lanes and some can be SHARED with the processor.Gen11 has 44, The Z5xx SKYLAKE chipset. BOTH, procs, GEN10 and GEN11 use up to 16 PCIE lanes, they can both SHARE some with HSIO, PCIE HSIO will suffer if the processor needs them. Both Gen10 Cometlake and Gen11 Skylake require at least 10, but 16 will be used since the computer is dead if it can't process. There are 34 available on Cometlake and Gen11+Skylake, has 38. Now after you drop your super rad GPU, and that second slot is a dinger because this isn't a raid card, it is just a 4 slot NVME card, it's in the name... Both ASUS, who make 2 generations of motherboards that can drop GPU to 8x and use 8 more and that is 16, did you can you were using an M.2 slot for storage? NVME or SSD in that M.2? Is it NVME Gen4, which TAKES 4 PCH lanes, or Gene which can use 2? Are you using that Pcie 1x slot? Did you disable anything else? Because the BIOS has to support the switch up between assignment of lanes, that 3rd 16x lane has no scenario on either Proc Gen in which it even uses 8x LVDS. LowVoltageSignalDifferential, that white PCI slot had to, a PCIE GEN3 1X slot using LDVS is around 8 times faster than that white slot pci-133.The board this card caters to is an ASUS addon and best specs are for Gen11 on Z5xx Skylakewas series chipset .Don't forget about High Speed USB. It also falls under HS-IO and needs some lanes, what gen USB and how many ports of that Gen are ENABLED, and again, the BIOS must support the exchange of assignment.Okay so your super, all your base belongs to GPU, is force down to 8 lanes. Now are you using any Sata? Count 2 lanes per pair.1GPU, 2NVME GEN4, that's 16Lanes. 8 + 4 + 4. That's right, bet you thought you were using that PCIE16 all this time, nope. That "all your base" gaming and graphics was only using 8 lanes and using PCIE GEN2 frequency of 5ghz and 8GBs bandwidth, regardless of what you thought you were doing, they still don't make a game that requires more that PCIE2 x 16 requirements, dispife a Gen4 PCIE slot, with 8 x 4pins per LVDS lane. You have only been using half your card, and half the capable throughput of the generation of the slot, since PCIE4, is only supported with Gen11 Intel procs / 5xx chipset.Despite the appearance VROC is more akin to motherboard and processor agreement to sacrifice lanes the proc might use, for VROC raid lanes, since it's not designed or dedicated, if you aren't doing anything else with them and want to risk a performance hit.At this point on the ASUS ROG STRIX line of motherboards, if you actually have that third slot being 16bits (4 x 4pin pairs wide) it is and has never been able to use more than pcie1 gen3, if you had a sata device and PCIE Gen2 x 8lane cards in the 16x (possible) PCIE lane slots.Hope it helps...

Much better design in comparison with the Gigabyte AORUS.The gigabyte one (Overengineered imo) is larger and much heavier in weight than the ASUS.You need native pcie bifurcation support (x4/x4/x4/x4) on the motherboard slot to use 4 M.2 drives on this card. Most of the X570 boards support it (on primary x16 slot) whereas server/HEDT series tend to offer this as a standard. You can run 2 cards if your motherboard slot supports bifurcation x4/x4Installation is pretty straightforward. You get 4 set of screws + nvme standoffs.Thermal pads are pre-applied on the heatsink mount which can be accessed by removing the screws on the backside of the PCBTest SetupAMD 3970X threadripper processorMSI TRX40 Pro WifiI've tested 4 x 980 PROs gen4 pcie based NVMe drives on it and speeds were pretty solid.Test Results----------------------------------------------------1 drive, 1m sequential read----------------------------------------------------iops-test-job: (groupid=0, jobs=3): err= 0: pid=3761: Sun Mar 20 17:17:01 2022read: IOPS=6113, BW=6114MiB/s (6410MB/s)(179GiB/30023msec)bw ( MiB/s): min= 5368, max= 6212, per=100.00%, avg=6113.57, stdev=35.04, samples=180iops : min= 5368, max= 6212, avg=6113.55, stdev=35.04, samples=180cpu : usr=0.13%, sys=2.95%, ctx=179304, majf=0, minf=24601IO depths : 1=0.1%, 2=0.1%, 4=0.1%, 8=0.1%, 16=0.1%, 32=99.9%, >=64=0.0%submit : 0=0.0%, 4=100.0%, 8=0.0%, 16=0.0%, 32=0.0%, 64=0.0%, >=64=0.0%complete : 0=0.0%, 4=100.0%, 8=0.0%, 16=0.0%, 32=0.1%, 64=0.0%, >=64=0.0%issued rwts: total=183546,0,0,0 short=0,0,0,0 dropped=0,0,0,0latency : target=0, window=0, percentile=100.00%, depth=32Run status group 0 (all jobs):READ: bw=6114MiB/s (6410MB/s), 6114MiB/s-6114MiB/s (6410MB/s-6410MB/s), io=179GiB (192GB), run=30023-30023msecDisk stats (read/write):nvme1n1: ios=365292/0, merge=0/0, ticks=5706849/0, in_queue=4502120, util=99.73%----------------------------------------------------4 drives, 4K random reads----------------------------------------------------iops-test-job: (groupid=0, jobs=12): err= 0: pid=3991: Sun Mar 20 16:36:49 2022read: IOPS=2948k, BW=11.2GiB/s (12.1GB/s)(337GiB/30002msec)bw ( MiB/s): min=11331, max=11675, per=99.99%, avg=11514.44, stdev= 6.20, samples=720iops : min=2900966, max=2988968, avg=2947695.42, stdev=1586.47, samples=720cpu : usr=16.79%, sys=43.72%, ctx=28857428, majf=0, minf=2904IO depths : 1=0.1%, 2=0.1%, 4=0.1%, 8=0.1%, 16=0.1%, 32=0.1%, >=64=100.0%submit : 0=0.0%, 4=100.0%, 8=0.0%, 16=0.0%, 32=0.0%, 64=0.0%, >=64=0.0%complete : 0=0.0%, 4=100.0%, 8=0.0%, 16=0.0%, 32=0.0%, 64=0.0%, >=64=0.1%issued rwts: total=88442216,0,0,0 short=0,0,0,0 dropped=0,0,0,0latency : target=0, window=0, percentile=100.00%, depth=128Run status group 0 (all jobs):READ: bw=11.2GiB/s (12.1GB/s), 11.2GiB/s-11.2GiB/s (12.1GB/s-12.1GB/s), io=337GiB (362GB), run=30002-30002msecDisk stats (read/write):nvme1n1: ios=21991842/0, merge=0/0, ticks=15474265/0, in_queue=1012, util=99.59%nvme2n1: ios=21992170/0, merge=0/0, ticks=5821241/0, in_queue=0, util=99.67%nvme3n1: ios=21992011/0, merge=0/0, ticks=7619244/0, in_queue=56, util=99.67%nvme4n1: ios=21992024/0, merge=0/0, ticks=16531278/0, in_queue=2828, util=99.79%----------------------------------------------------4 drives, 1m sequential reads----------------------------------------------------iops-test-job: (groupid=0, jobs=12): err= 0: pid=4405: Sun Mar 20 16:40:04 2022read: IOPS=21.1k, BW=20.6GiB/s (22.1GB/s)(624GiB/30308msec)bw ( MiB/s): min=15592, max=31616, per=100.00%, avg=21226.21, stdev=234.64, samples=720iops : min=15592, max=31616, avg=21226.00, stdev=234.64, samples=720cpu : usr=0.14%, sys=3.68%, ctx=618340, majf=0, minf=393360IO depths : 1=0.1%, 2=0.1%, 4=0.1%, 8=0.1%, 16=0.1%, 32=0.1%, >=64=99.9%submit : 0=0.0%, 4=100.0%, 8=0.0%, 16=0.0%, 32=0.0%, 64=0.0%, >=64=0.0%complete : 0=0.0%, 4=100.0%, 8=0.0%, 16=0.0%, 32=0.0%, 64=0.0%, >=64=0.1%issued rwts: total=638888,0,0,0 short=0,0,0,0 dropped=0,0,0,0latency : target=0, window=0, percentile=100.00%, depth=128Run status group 0 (all jobs):READ: bw=20.6GiB/s (22.1GB/s), 20.6GiB/s-20.6GiB/s (22.1GB/s-22.1GB/s), io=624GiB (670GB), run=30308-30308msecDisk stats (read/write):nvme1n1: ios=320576/0, merge=0/0, ticks=5180406/0, in_queue=4870436, util=99.40%nvme2n1: ios=320539/0, merge=0/0, ticks=6271111/0, in_queue=5909540, util=99.44%nvme3n1: ios=320463/0, merge=0/0, ticks=46037441/0, in_queue=45482780, util=99.44%nvme4n1: ios=318129/0, merge=0/0, ticks=33997124/0, in_queue=33433912, util=99.71%

It seems like a quality product but did not work out for my particular use. It was well built and easy to install. However it did not suit my needs.