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As for my specific situation: I'm running an Asrock B450-HDV R4.0 with a Ryzen 5 3600 CPU and a Geforce 1080 GPU. As the board does not come with onboard WiFi, I intend to install a network card in the PCIe 1x slot (outlined in yellow in following diagram from page 6 of the motherboard manual).

Diagram of ASRock B450-HDV motherboard

Would a NVMe M.2 SSD (installed in the slot in the board, outlined in green in that diagram above) cause problems with any of this? If it would, would a SATA M.2 SSD block the use of any SATA port on this particular board (the manual is of little help)?

(I am aware that the difference in day-to-day use between the two is marginal, but the same is true for the price, so I may as well get the shiniest toy).

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2 Answers 2

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A careful review of the motherboard manual does not show putting an NVMe M.2 drive, or an SATA M.2 drive, in the M.2 slot would cause any conflict with lanes or ports on this board, and that's a good question to ask, since with other boards, such as the Gigabyte Z390 Ultra, adding a SATA M.2 drive will reduce I/O speed on some SATA drive ports, and adding an NVMe M.2 drive will block some SATA drive ports.

However, for the latest facts, please direct a question to ASRock Support via their support qeblink, https://event.asrock.com/tsd.asp

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This is a "slightly-educated-guess"... but not 100% certain.

The CPU has 24 PCIe 3.0 lanes total. (4 are used to talk to the b450 chipset to provide other stuff) Without a doubt, 16 lanes are dedicated to the PCIe x16 slot for the graphics card.
That leaves 4 channels that can be configured in one of two ways that are directly attached to the CPU:

1 x NVMe x2 lanes and 2 x SATA 3Gbps

-- or --

1 x NVMe x4 lanes.

The b450 chipset only provides Gen2 PCIe lanes, where the CPU provides Gen3. According to the specs for the motherboard, it supports Gen3 x4 NVMe... which makes me believe that the 2nd option is the case, and the SATA ports are actually provided through the b450 chipset.

As for the other PCIe slots (like the one you want to stuff the wifi card into... ) are offered through the chipset.

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