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Does Area 51 R4 motherboard supports pcie Bifurcation?
I recently purchased my area 51 R4 with i9-7900x, I also purchased 2 samsung 960 pro M.2 NVMe ssd and a ASUS HYPER x16 PCIe extension card with 4 NVMe slots on it, after installation I could only find 1 ssd in system and after some research I realised I need a motherboard with PCIe Bifurcation to make the system recognised all the ssd on the extension card, but I couldn't find any option in BIOS settings. Any ideas?
speedstep
8 Wizard
8 Wizard
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December 8th, 2017 12:00
Asrock X99e does and Asrock Z170 Fatality does.
Area51 does not, PCIe port bifurcation is a method to split an existing 16x lane or 32x lane to 8x/8x or 16x/16x . You can't just split REFCLK (200Mhz HCSL) to 2 cards, the bios needs to use a clock buffer.
This adds a decent amount of extra complexity to a board.
The RACK 7910 supports this.
Notes from the 7910 bios patch
"Replacing a PCIe card from the same vendor but with different Device ID resulted in PCIe slot auto bifurcation issue and displayed Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) error."
Dell Precision Rack 7910 BIOS Version 2.1.6 Driver Details | Dell Argentina
This is not a bios option on the Area 51.
Configure PCI-Express* Lanes for Simultaneous Applications