On 2020.10.14 16:02, antlists wrote:
On 14/10/2020 19:58, Grant Edwards wrote:
On 2020-10-14, antlists <antli...@youngman.org.uk> wrote:
Does your mobo support NVMe drives? Just be aware my mobo is crap in
that it says it supports two graphics cards, NVMe, etc, but if you
stick
an NVMe in the second graphics card is disabled, or if you use both
the
NVMe slots you lose a couple of SATA ports, or whatever. Bit of a
PoS in
that regard.
I think that's pretty common. NVMe uses PCI-express channels that are
often shared with one of the PCI-express "slots" on the motherboard.
As a result you can't use both at the same time.
Is that the sign of a cheap/rubbishy mobo?
Which is why I'm somewhat pissed off with that motherboard and the
shop...
I took in a home-built system - with a £90 Gigabyte mobo - and said
"it won't boot, I suspect the BIOS needs upgrading". When I went to
fetch it, they said "it won't boot, the mobo's duff, so we've
replaced it". They gave me the old mobo back, which I discovered was
still under warranty so I sent it off ... came back "nothing wrong,
we've updated the BIOS and it works fine" !!!
Bearing in mind (a) I need SATA ports for RAID, and (b) I want to run
double-headed so I need two graphics cards, I'm well pissed that they
charged me about £150 for the mobo (because they had difficulty
finding one with loads of SATA ports), but as soon as I stick the
second graphics card in some of the SATA ports stop working!
Why do you need two graphics cards? I've been driving two monitors off
each of the last several graphics cards I've used - both nVidia and
ATI, from simple PCI to PCIE needing the extra power connector.
As far as I can tell the original Gigabyte has sufficient channels to
drive everything no problem! I won't be using THAT shop again ...
Still. The old mobo will be going in a new case (it wouldn't fit it
my spare) which will be a Coolermaster with room for plenty of 3.5
drives. That'll become my testbed/dev machine, which will probably
"break" at regular intervals as it stress-tests the raid code.
I've bought a 2/4 port add-in SATA card for the system that's going
to be our main desktop. 2/4 because it's only got two SATA channels,
but they can go to either a SATA or eSATA port.
