NVMe SSD running at PCIE2.0 not PCIE3.0

[DigitalFlyer]

Hello,

I have a HP Pavilion Power 580-137c Desktop PC with a AMD Ryzen 7 1700 and a Basswood 8399 motherboard. I recently installed a AData XPG SX8200 NVMe SSD 1TB. The SSD supports speeds up to PCIE 4 and the CPU supports PCIE Gen 3. When I use the SSD utility it shows the SSD running at PCIE 2 speed. The SSD speed tests show about half the expected expected throughput from the SSD. 

I upgraded the BIOS to the latest version and checked the setting but there is no option to select PCIE bus speed. Any idea how to get the SSD to connect at PCIE 3 speed?

[Grzwacz · Accepted solution]

Greetings,

Welcome to the forum.

I am not a HP employee.

You may have a chipset limitation which cannot be mitigated.

I would say the chipset in your motherboard is limited to PCIe 2.0. The chipset is controlling data transfer rates to the M.2 socket on your motherboard.

The MB would support PCIe 3.0 for graphics because this is controlled by the CPU.

Maybe if you installed a M.2 adapter in the X16 slot (if you are not using a discrete graphics card) you could get PCIe 3.0 performance.

The read and write speeds you see are very fast. Faster than a SATA SSD. I can't tell the difference between a SATA SSD and a NVME SSD in everyday use. 

Benchmarks create problems where none may exist.

Regards

[DigitalFlyer]

Thanks for the response. It looks like the chipset may only have PCIE 2.0 and these lanes are likely routed to the m.2 slot. This is probably a limitation of the budget motherboard.

I do have a graphics card in the x16 slot so using an m.2 adapter is not an option although it would be a good experiment. 

I'm not sure about "Benchmarks create problems where none may exist." in this case the benchmark revealed a limitation on the motherboard, not a problem.

[Grzwacz]

Hi,

You're very welcome.

Regards