using a Asus Hyper M.2 x16 PCIe card with 2 NVMe in a HP Z440 workstation

[GK-AT]

Since there were discussions about the Asus Hyper M.2 x16 card I want to describe how I could manage to use it in my HP Z440 workstation together with two HP Z-Turbodrive NVMe. One (256 GB, standard 1.0) was used before together with the HP Z Turbodrive G2 modul as boot disc, the other (512 GB, standard 1.2 ) was new and unused. Both were put into the Asus hyper card. After setting the BIOS as needed the 256 GB disc booted normally and showed the 512 GB NVMe as new available disc. The performance of both is really amazing.

The basic information for the card is provided by Asus at https://www.asus.com/support/FAQ/1037507 . It says

• The Asus card needs a x16 slot. The slot for the Asus card has to be set to x4x4x4x4 mode. At the Z440 you can do this in the bios at “advanced/slot settings” with the bifurcation mode
• If you use a graphic card in the other x16 slot you have to reduce the PCIe mode, otherwise the you don’t see the NVMe in the system. There are two possibilities described
  • The slot for the graphic card is set to x8x8 --> then you can use 2 NVMe in the Asus card
  • The slot for the graphic card is set to x4x4x4x4-->  then you can use all 4 NVMe in the Asus card

I tried both settings with two NVMe (I didn’t have more available) and both settings worked.

I also change the slots for the graphic card and the Asus card. First standard slot 2 for the graphic card and slot 5 for Asus, then the otherway round. It worked in all settings

Below the pictures of the bios settings and the crystalDiskmark7 results, compared to anormal SSD in the Z440, also the crystalDiskinfo on the NVMe.

bios settings

512 GB NVMe standard 1.2256 GB NVMe standard 1.0512 GB SSD256 GB disc info