Getting half advertised rates on a Clover UEFI NVME installed in a PCIE 3.0 4x slot:LSTS negotiated at 5.0 GT/S, should be 8.0 GT/S. Help?

[JohnLasheras]

Greetings,

I recently installed a Samsung 970 EVO NVME drive into a PCIE 3.0 4x adapter on my Gigabyte GA-B85M-D3H motherboard by using Clover UEFI Bootloader. I don't have that much money, but was looking to upgrade cheaply to reduce load times in games, increase file transfer rates, and I needed a new drive anyway as my 5 year old SSD is coming close to its rewrite capacity. After everything was installed, I noticed that I was only getting around half the advertised rate for read and writes on the drive.

To start off with, I have a few questions..
1) Is PCIE GEN3 capable of enough data transfer bandwidth to saturate the NVME or do I need GEN4?

This is a brand new drive, it seems to work fine, it has been trimmed and I've tried the following options to try and increase the speed

1) Enable Gen 3 PCIE in the BIOS. Didn't change anything
2) Disable the secondary SATA SSD I have installed in my computer. Couldn't boot, so I scrapped this idea.
3) Tried increasing the memory clock rate on my DDR3 ram. Didn't do anything except increase my CPU temps dramatically.

Any ideas on what I should do to get the full speed possible?

 

[Dalai]

According to the manual, the PCIe x4 slot is connected to the chipset (see block diagram on page 5). Intel ARK says the chipset only supports PCIe 2.0. This means that your SSD will run at PCIe 2.0 x4 bandwidth at the most, which is half of PCIe 3.0 x4 bandwidth (and the same bandwidth as PCIe 3.0 x2).

So you won't get the full speed on this mainboard unless you install the drive in the PCIe x16 slot, which is connected directly to the CPU.

Regards
Dalai

 

[JohnLasheras]

According to the manual, the PCIe x4 slot is connected to the chipset (see block diagram on page 5). Intel ARK says the chipset only supports PCIe 2.0. This means that your SSD will run at PCIe 2.0 x4 bandwidth at the most, which is half of PCIe 3.0 x4 bandwidth (and the same bandwidth as PCIe 3.0 x2).

So you won't get the full speed on this mainboard unless you install the drive in the PCIe x16 slot, which is connected directly to the CPU.

Regards
Dalai

Yeah I figured by this point. I was mislead by the idea that the GEN settings were just for the PCIE 16X slot.. Maybe it's time to finally upgrade after all, yet still, I am seeing a 3-4x increase in speed and the NVME I have is a good item to hold onto for my next build as a secondary drive or primary drive even. Thank you for doing the work I was too lazy to do and thank you for your help!!

Sincerely,
John Lasheras

 

[Dalai]

[...] yet still, I am seeing a 3-4x increase in speed and the NVME I have is a good item to hold onto for my next build as a secondary drive or primary drive even.

Yes, indeed. It's not wrong to buy such a drive since it can be used in other systems. And, one advantage of getting only half the speed is that the drive might not get as hot .

Thank you for doing the work I was too lazy to do and thank you for your help!!

You're welcome.

Regards
Dalai

 

[JohnLasheras]

Hey guys, I recommend highly not to use CLOVER UEFI. It is highly unstable, will overload your CPU and does funny tricks in terms of programming to get working with older motherboards. You'll notice that on the north and south bridges, temps get extremely fucking hot and my motherboard becomes extremely unstable. On older motherboards, these components are not really built for that kinda stuff. You can see why forcing this little schema causes so much heartache if you are trying to run a nice m.2 drive on an old piece of shit computer through an adapter. I'm telling you, what you need to do is allow CLOVER UEFI to install on your old hardware and eventually, you won't really have too much of a workaround unless you want to waste time completely flashing everything.

I just formatted another harddrive full of stuff I needed and now I have to go through an old 2tb disk to even use this thing again. Well, I am going to mostly use my laptop and this old computer when it's cooler to use. I've been really stressing out my old motherboard on this UEFI garbage and I've been looking at my temps and they've gotten extremely hot with usage over the last month or so. This bootloader is a piece of shit and will destroy your computer, don't use it.