Bifurcation support? Do 8300-cmt's or ProDesk 600 V4 support Bifurcation.

[Mike-Lynch]

OR. do any HP End User Motherboards Support Bifurcation?

[Bill_To]

Greetings @Mike-Lynch 

Welcome to the HP Forum. 

Do you want to chunk up a PCIe x16 slot so you can do an M.2 adapter supporting multiple M.2 drives?

Each PC's BIOS, probably Advanced PCIe settings, would have to be checked for this option.

I don't have access to either PC.

Try posting your question in this HP Forum Board. Someone in this HP Forum Board might be able to assist.

Regards

[Bill_To]

Greetings 

My initial response is humorous.

I just realized I was posting in the Business PC Forum!

🤣🤣

Regards

[SDH · Accepted solution]

Mike, no for sure on the E8300 series PCs, ever. To check the ProDesk 600 V4 just look into the BIOS settings available in the manuals. I'm pretty sure the answerer there is also no, never.

For background: Bifurcation is a combined hardware and BIOS capability to split up a PCIe slot into multiple segments of 4 true electrical lanes each. A M.2 sticks needs 4 lanes for its optimal performance.  A PCIe x8 slot can support two M.2 sticks and a PCIe x16 slot can support up to four. Technically that should be called quadrification, but we just call it bifurcation.

History: Bifurcation is quite a sophisticated advance. It is very different from use of a plex chip on a PCIe card to let more than one M.2 stick feed data in/out of a single PCIe slot at full speed. The first HP workstation that had the hardware and BIOS capabilities to support bifurcation initially was the Z840. Later HP upgraded BIOS in the Z440 and Z640 to support bifurcation (and quadrification too). I've run a ZTD Quad Pro with 4 M.2 NVMe sticks plus 1 more M.2 stick in a ZTD G2 simultaneously, in a souped up Z440.

The Elite 8300 series of business class computers certainly will never support bifurcation. In fact, they don't fully support UEFI. I've posted on use of OPROM-supplemented NVMe drives that brought true NVMe capabilities to the Elite 8300 business class computers and to the Z420/Z620/Z820 series of HP workstations (which also only have a limited UEFI capability). That gives these a big boost in capabilities but they cannot use bifurcation.

HP engineered the excellent Z Turbo Drive G1 and G2 cards which can also be used in earlier HP computers like the Elite 8300 series if a single tiny surface mount transistor is removed (the "Q1 Out" method, easy to do). They also created the Z Turbo Drive Dual Pro G1 and G2 which can hold up to two M.2 sticks. Finally, the Z Turbo Drive Quad Pro can hold up to 4 M.2 sticks. 

A little tip: I've found the E8300 SFF can reliably run the Samsung 950 PRO (it has the special supplemental OPROM boot code) in a Q1-Out ZTD G1 or G2 plus a small form factor K620 card in the long dark and long white PCIe slots, respectively. You only get PCIe Gen3 bandwidth from the long dark slot if an Intel i7-3770 processor is in place (which controls that slot). You never will get more than PCIe Gen2 bandwidth from the long white slot because the soldered-on Q77 chipset controls that and only can provide Gen2 PCIe. You get surprising video performance out of a video card in that long white slot and can run 2 monitors from the card.  Or, you can just use the built in DisplayPort port for running 1 monitor. This has been a fun little project.

The bigger E8300 MT/CMT form factors have bigger (320W instead of 240W) power supplies and can do even more. However, a better project is to just soup up a Z440 to the max.