SATA expansion card in Asus P8Z77-V Deluxe PCI-E slot

[Shawny.C]

My motherboard is Asus P8Z77-V Deluxe. In future I am looking forward to install dual GPU's. But before that I want to install a SATA expansion card in the top-most PCI-E 2.0 4x slot. But I have a little doubt about this configuration. I don’t know if putting SATA expansion card on PCI-E 2.0 4x slot will affect the PCI-E 3.0 x8, x8 in which I am going to add dual GPU's. I don’t have much knowledge about this kind configuration but if anyone has experienced potential impacts of such a configuration, I would be grateful to hear from them.

[Baldwin]

As far as I think that there is no affect at all with it. The x4 lane comes from the PC, not from the CPU. So you don’t have to worry about that. For SATA expansion card, performance is not an important factors since if you using the drives only for storage rather than for other tasks like apps, games and OS. In my case if I add an expansion card in PCI-E 2.0 4x slot, it may block my GPU's airflow, so that's a no-go. If you are looking for a good expansion card, my recommendation is to get the IBM M1015 8 port SAS card which you can buy directly from the Ebay. The last slot which you use does not make any affect on CPU native x16 lanes.

[Kiran25]

I assume that the PLX processor used on the motherboard is completely different from that we used on the gaming boards. They are not meant for the Graphics card. It is not possible for you to add video card in the bottom black PCIe slot. Actually the PCI-E 2.0 x 4 links is the black x16 slot on the bottom. If you are using the Ivy Bridge with Z77/Z75/H77/B75 chipsets, you will see completely separate bandwidth pools with PCI-E 2.0 and PCI-E 3.0. From Ivy Bridge CPU, you will get PCI-E 3.0 x16 link, however, PCI-E 2.0 x4 & x1 links can be obtained from the Chipset PCH. Everything is completely depends on which PCIe SATA adapter uses the 1x or 4x bandwidth capability. If you look at the PCIe 2.0 specification, it defines a 1x slot bandwidth as 500 MB/s. I assume that this value is much greater than the SATA-II. So the data transfer rate could 4.69 Gbps, if you purchase a card like this. As you know that the 8b/10b encoding used by SATA and it gets maximum speed of 469 MB/s after translating. On the other hand the SATA-II only caps out at 300 MB/s,