About to do new FULL ATX Build Wanted buying advice on what Z390 full ATX board to get?

[pastrychef]

One more question. What are your thoughts on the 9900KF? does it work well. from wha tI have heard it is just the 9900k with no iGPU with I have turned off anyway.

Yes, it's just a 9900K with no IGPU.

I have a 9400F. I haven't had any problems with it.

 

[jbarnette]

Does ASUS not have a board with titanridge thunderbolt 3?

 

[pastrychef]

Does ASUS not have a board with titanridge thunderbolt 3?

I'm sure they do. All the current boards with Thunderbolt should be Titan Ridge.

 

[kylec]

Is it possible to do dual NVMe drive in a Raid0?

It's possible. With Z390, it means using your GPU with PCI-e x8, instead of x16. Don't try it with your SSDs on the PCH (the motherboard slots), because there isn't enough bandwidth between the CPU and PCH.

You can either use two regular M.2 PCI-e adapter cards, with a board that's spec'd for x8/x4/x4 SLI, or you can get a Supermicro AOC-SLG3-2M2 card and hack your BIOS for PCI-e bifurcation. I wrote a post about this, recently:

Moving my boot volume to APFS RAID

Recently I got a Supermicro AOC-SLG3-2M2 dual M.2 card. You can use two x4 M.2 NVMe drives in this card, and it's inexpensive, but the PCI-e slot has to support bifurcation. Well, how to do this depends on your chipset. The newest ones can handle it automatically. It's not so simple on most X99...

www.tonymacx86.com

APFS RAID is the built-in software RAID, and it's working fine for me here (but watch out for that problem I wrote about involving the caches). There's also SoftRAID - it comes bundled with certain OWC cards, but you can purchase it too. Intel RST is incompatible.

 

[jbarnette]

does the Asus hyper x work on Mac?

 

[kylec]

Yes, as long as your motherboard can do the bifurcation.

But it's an x16 device. You don't have enough PCI-e lanes to take advantage of it, unless you use IGPU only. That's why I recommend the dual card that's x8, or more simply, just use 2 slots.

You can also look at the OWC 4m2 card.

 

[pastrychef]

Why not just use the motherboard M.2 slots. Most motherboards feature two x4 M.2 slots nowadays.

If you must, you can even use two x4 motherboard M.2 with a PCI-e x8 adaptor for an additional two NVMe SSDs to RAID four SSDs.

There's no need to bifurcate anything.

Even the Z390 M Gaming you have in storage has two M.2 slots that support x4 NVMe SSDs. The last PCI-e slot is x4 so you can add another NVMe SSD in there and you can stripe three SSDs.

 

[kylec]

While I agree that dealing with the bifurcation stuff doesn't make sense on a Z390 board, OP asked about RAID. You can't do it with the PCH slots, because there's not enough bandwidth in the DMI link.

I tried it once, and it gave no performance improvement.

 

[pastrychef]

While I agree that dealing with the bifurcation stuff doesn't make sense on a Z390 board, OP asked about RAID. You can't do it with the PCH slots, because there's not enough bandwidth in the DMI link.

I tried it once, and it gave no performance improvement.

If CPU PCI-e lanes must be used, most Z370 and Z390 with two full length PCI-e slots already have the second PCI-e slot preconfigured to use x8 CPU lanes.

The following is from the Maximus XI Hero (Wi-Fi):

When the second full length slot is populated, the bifurcation is automatic.

 

[jbarnette]

Motherboard is defiantly going to be a Z390 as I'm using a i9-9900K There just isn't really anything more compelling on the intel side o things right now. The Raid I was asking about for myself I was thinking about getting a couple 500GB M.2 drives and making a in the Disk Utility setting it up as a Raid 0 and making it my system drive. I'm just curious about wha the dependability about something like this is. From what I understand this is the way that the iMac Pro and the "NEW" Mac Pro both operate.

However I have a client that wants to run one fo the 4X M.2 Hyper cards from ASUS. and have that loaded with 4 1TB 970 plus drives for the purposes of video editing.

But honestly I don't even understand how one of these works. from what I have read the i9 only has like 16 PCIe lanes anyway so as soon as you plug anything in any other card you are dropping the graphics from 16 to 8 to make lanes available is that correct?