PCI-E question

Another question.

I tend to have issues where Fortnite freezes due to textures loading at the beginning of a game for about a minute or two off and on, but is fine after that.

I have a PCIE X4 slot free which is PCIE version 1.1. Is it possible to use a PCI Express NVMe card with adapter in that slot and gain faster read write speeds or is the SATA drive faster given I only have the PCIE 1.1 version?

Doesn't matter if I cannot boot to that drive as it could be used merely for storage of games so I can have faster load times.

However if I can boot to it that would be nice.

What I might do if there is a drive that works is to clone the main SSD and just see if it can boot to it.

If it does that would be nice.

If not that's ok as I can wipe that drive completely and use it for storage.

However if the drive is bootable I should see it in the boot order list in BIOS, right?

If I can use the drive at least for storage and it will be faster than the SATA drive I am looking at two.

https://www.amazon.com/Crucial-Plus...935-20&ascsubtag=01dFQLbOWuqRP81ajfHy7vA&th=1

https://www.amazon.com/Crucial-500G.../B086BGWNY8/ref=psdc_1292116011_t3_B098W1NDV2

Also what PCIE X4 adapter would be recommended?
 
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does not matter how fast of a pcie card you put in it because an older mother board will be limited
if you have a need for speed consider a total upgrade
 
So basically the card with the PCIE 3 spec would be the better choice as I'm limited to PCIE 1.1 spec, right.

Now will that card be faster than SATA? If not I won't bother with it.

Also will the card be within the power draw limit of the PCIE 1.1 specification?

Something like this is pretty much all I can do right now as I won't have the money to build a new PC or buy a more recent used PC and upgrade it for quite some time.
 
go to their web site support page...look for answers there or google your board & see if anybody else has done this. I can't help you much because I have no idea what board your using.

Edit: you won't see any difference with an nvme drive over your existing ssd on an older motherboard. Just use the money from getting a nvme pcie card and put it towards getting an upgraded board, cpu and memory
 
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Seems like it could be possible to at minimum use it as storage.

https://superuser.com/questions/1490797/m-2-nvme-ssd-on-10-year-old-computer

However on another website I saw this.



"Sean Farrelly
, knows English
Answered 2 years ago · Author has 2.2K answers and 988.7K answer views
No. Unless you get a pcie adapter but this will take away some power from your graphics slot. Your graphics card slot is 16x but with an adapter it will bring this down to 8x on most boards when slot 2 is running at 4x for the adapter. If you don’t play games or you use onboard graphics then this is not an issue. If you play games that are not too graphically demanding as to not saturate 8x speeds on graphic slot then there is no issue as well."

From https://www.quora.com/Will-newer-M-2-NVME-drives-work-on-older-computers

On my motherboard the X16 slot according to the block diagram goes straight to the graphics/memory controller chipset, whereas the X4 slot goes to the I/O controller hub chipset.


Would what I quoted be true of my motherboard?

The first website someone mentioned about having something called clover on the SATA drive and first booting to it then loading the driver for the PCIE NBVME card and proceeding to boot to Windows on the PCIE drive. Will that work and be easy to implement or is there another bootloader that does the same or better or is it not even worth it to try?

If I did try it I'd use a regular hard drive initially to set it up and get it working. That way if somehow it doesn't work or data gets screwed up I have the original SSD that can be simply plugged back in and the PC is as it was before trying the bootloader. The NVME card then becomes just another drive I can use for storage. It is possible to move Fortnite to another location so even if I cannot make the drive bootable I could still put Fortnite on there and maybe the textures will load a little faster.

Of course if there's absolutely no real performance gain to be had I will save my money.

Here's the block diagram of the motherboard.

1 diagram.png
 
I had figured there wouldn't be much if any difference.

However I could get the better NVME drive and adapter just to try it and if I see no performance gains I can simply wipe the drive and I'll already have the hard drive for my new PC and that will be one thing I do not have to buy later.

If I do for instance go with a used PC how far back in years should I look? I figure maybe about 3-4 maximum.
 
I decided to get the drive and adapter as I got a bonus from work.

I'm cloning the disk now.

Once done I'll power down and disconnect the SATA cable from the SSD then go in BIOS and see if I can configure it to boot from the drive.

If it does then good. If it does not I've lost nothing as I can simply wipe the drive and re-install Fortnite to it. Gotta find some software to see if the new drive is faster than the SSD with my hardware configuration.

Of course if it boots using the drive and Windows comes up quicker and things load quicker then I'll know for sure it's faster.

If so I'll take the SSD and get a program to back up the main drive to it weekly so that I have a working backup.

EDIT:

I did copy the disk, but realized I should have cloned it.

When I booted up I had bootable add in cards selected in BIOS as the first choice and it said invalid system disk so I at least know it can be seen during the boot process.

Now I'm cloning the drive and will see if I can boot from it.

I used a program to copy the disk initially as I did not want to pay the 54.99 for Mini Tool partition Wizard, but when copy didn't work right I looked again and it was only that price for a whole year so I bought it.

I've used the free version for years to clone disks and do other partition work and it's always been a good piece of software.

EDIT:

Nope can't boot to it. You were right about that.

Now it is possible to use a bootloader on the main drive with the necessary driver for the NVME hard drive and then it will boot from it.

What I will do is putt he bootloader on a thumb drive to experiment with it while the SATS SSD is disconnected so that I do not run the risk of any data loss on the SATA drive.

That way if I simply cannot get the bootloader to be right I can put the SATA drive in and be back to normal.

According to Crystal Disk Mark it seems like there is a significant speed increase with the new drive.


1 SATA.png

1 NVME.png
 
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