HP Pavilion Gaming Desktop 690-00xx

[Wayne011]

I have the HP 690-00xx gaming PC.  It's a Ryzen 7 1700 with 16 GB RAM and a Radeon RX 550 graphics card. The HDD is a 1 GB Toshiba.

The motherboard (Sunflower) has the following connections:

One PCIe x16 slot

One PCIe x1 slot

One M.2 socket 1, key A

One M.2 socket 3, key M

I would like to add a M.2 type SSD. I believe my PC will accept the M.2 SATA. What isn't clear to me is whether I should consider other alternatives.

It seems, for example, that there are M.2 drives that use SATA/PCIe or PCIe. I'm rather fuzzy on the variations that are available. I'm assuming that the M.2 slot on the Sunflower motherboard will not support the PCIe versions and that using M.2 drives specific to the PCIe slot require a more advanced PC. Is that correct?

[banhien · Accepted solution]

@Wayne011 

What is your 690-00xx machine ? The series has few different motherboards. I believe you can also use M.2 NVMe SSD drive because the following machine also has Sunflower motherboard and has 128 GB PCIe NVMe M.2 Solid State Drive

              https://support.hp.com/si-en/document/c06010496

Regards.

[Wayne011]

The machine always shows up as 690-00xx, even in the Systems Information under Windows.  That seems very strange to me but I've never found anything more specific.  I recently used Belarc to run a profile on the machine and it also shows 690-00xx.  I believe I bought it through Costco so perhaps it's a "private label" model?

In any case, Belarc shows the motherboard as HP 8433 11.  I checked a photo of that board against the board shown in the link you provided and the boards do appear to be the same (Sunflower).  I also checked a couple of memory/drive providers (Mr Memory and Crucial) and they both show a M.2 SATA option but no PCIe NVME M.2 options.

My understanding is that the NVME drives are much faster than the SATA drives so I would rather go that route if possible.  Given that the suppliers don't offer a NVME option, though, I'm inclined to think it isn't an option in my case.  I tried finding a "compatible upgrade" recommendation tool (like the Mr Memory and Crucial sites) on the HP site but I haven't located anything yet.  If you are aware of one, please advise.

All that said, while doing some more research and stumbled across a thread that you contributed to on this board from a couple of years ago which covers this same exact question (that person had a 690-0067c model).  Following is a key comment from a different contributor to that thread:

"I have seen some HP motherboards that have an M.2 socket which will not recognize an M.2 SATA device.  PCIe 3x4 NVME devices work as expected.  HP, wisely, opts to use the faster PCIe 3x4 HSIO SDIP ( High Speed Input/Output, Serial Digital Interface Protocol) when configuring M.2 sockets on the motherboard.  The Sunflower motherboard may support SATA 6 GB/sec and PCIe 3x4."

Based on the link you provided, and that comment, my guess is that the PCIe NVME M.2 option will work.  It does seem very strange, however, that the contributor has seen M.2 SATA drives that don't work when the upgrade suppliers list the M.2 SATA drives as the recommended upgrade.  

Thanks for your assistance.