NVMe via PCIe on GA Z87X-UD5 TH

[slowcon]

I have a working install of El Capitan (10.11.6) and am looking to add a NVMe drive. My current setup is:

• CPU - Intel i7-4970K
• GPU - GTX 980 Ti Classified
• Motherboard - GA Z87X UD5-TH - Bios v F4
• PCIe Expansion Card - Lycom DT-120
• NVMe Drive - Samsung 960 Evo

The motherboard has these expansion slots:

1. 1 x PCI Express x16 slot, running at x16 (PCIEX16)
   * For optimum performance, if only one PCI Express graphics card is to be installed, be sure to install it in the PCIEX16 slot.
2. 1 x PCI Express x16 slot, running at x8 (PCIEX8)
   * The PCIEX8 slot shares bandwidth with the PCIEX16 slot. When the PCIEX8 slot is populated, the PCIEX16 slot will operate at up to x8 mode.
3. 1 x PCI Express x16 slot, running at x4 (PCIEX4)
   * The PCIEX4 slot shares bandwidth with the PCIEX8 and PCIEX16 slots. When the PCIEX4 slot is populated, the PCIEX16 slot will operate at up to x8 mode and the PCIEX8 will operate at up to x4 mode.
   * When installing a x8 or above card in the PCIEX4 slot, make sure to set PCIE Slot Configuration in BIOS Setup to x4. (Refer to Chapter 2, "BIOS Setup," "Peripherals," for more information.)
   (The PCI Express x16 slots conform to PCI Express 3.0 standard.)
4. 2 x PCI Express x1 slots
   (The PCI Express x1 slots conform to PCI Express 2.0 standard.)
5. 1 x PCI slot
6. 1 x mini-PCI Express slot for the wireless communication module

I have my GTX 980 installed in the PCI Express x16 slot, running at x16 (PCIEX16)(#1 above). I am confident I can get the NVMe drive running with the RehabMan/PikeRAlpha kexts.

My main concern is will the Lycom DT-120/960 Evo in the 1 x PCI Express x16 slot, running at x4 (PCIEX4) cause any performance issues with my GPU? This Hackintosh is used solely for video editing in Adobe Premiere/After Effects, with all optimizations are catered towards being able to edit faster. Faster to me means being able to scrub my timeline without any stutter, being able to work at Full, faster renders, etc...

I found an article called PCIe 3.0 x8 vs. x16: Does It Impact GPU Performance? The conclusion of this article is that it does not really make a difference, but it only addresses video games.

Any insight or links to further reading would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you!

 

[slowcon]

I found this post from Puget Systems: Titan X Performance: PCI-E 3.0 x8 vs x16.
They also say that it does not make a difference in their benchmarks. Has anyone seen anything to contradict this when running Adobe Premiere or After Effects?

 

[Stork]

Does your Z87 motherboard/BIOS support NVMe drives?

 

[slowcon]

Does your Z87 motherboard/BIOS support NVMe drives?

Thanks for the reply.

I was under the impression that the NVMe drive on a Z87 board could be used as storage, just not as a boot drive. Upon doing more research, I found this thread: [Guide] How to get full NVMe support for all Systems with an AMI UEFI BIOS.

Going to dive into this post and see what some users are experiencing. I have also put some thought into grabbing a new motherboard that will support NVMe but also my 1150 processor(If one exists).

Will report back with findings.

 

[Flyinace2000]

I know this is old. but did you get this working. I have a similar board and wanted to move my primary boot from a Samsung 840 Pro (256GB) to a 1TB NVMe. I'm also not opposed to running clover on a USB drive and then have the NVMe for macOS and the second 840 Pro from Win10.