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December 22nd, 2016 10:00
Alienware Aurora R5 NVMe M.2 SSD / GTX1080 issues
I have just purchased a new Alienware Aurora R5 full loaded and had discovered that my GTX 1080 Graphics card was running at x8 versus x16 on the PCIe 3.0 lanes.
So, come to find out from the Alienware engineers, you cannot order the NVMe M.2 SSD which is the only offering versus a standard HDD and have the GTX 1080 run at x16 on the PCIe lane. Apparently the motherboard cannot split the lanes so that the GTX1080 can run on the PCIe x16 lane.
See answers from Alienware engineers below.
I have an response from the engineering department.
The issue is due to you have on your system and PCIe M.2 SSD of 512 GB.
When you have this type of setup on your PC, the system will decrease the PCIe speed lines on your computer,that the reason why your video card is not running at PCIe x16.
In this scenario the best option will be to change the PCIe SSD of 512 GB to 2.5" SSD of 512GB.
That 2.5" SSD can be connected to the 3.5" HDD bay on the system and it will fix the issue.
Tesla1856
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December 22nd, 2016 12:00
I find this hard to believe. I think the Alienware Rep you spoke with might be confused, didn't understand the question, or possibly didn't fully explore possible solutions.
I know there is a limited number of lanes, but there are more now-days than before. The motherboard's M.2 slot should only be using 4-lanes (1 is not enough, 8 would be over-kill).
Did you try with only the NVMe M.2 SSD and NVidia-1080 installed (no other PCIe cards)?
Did you actually install a SATA-Drive and see NVidia-1080 go back to x16 (v3.0) ?
Did you try the other x16 slot?
I see your other post with good info here:
http://en.community.dell.com/owners-club/alienware/f/3746/t/20000381
cherzog1
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December 22nd, 2016 14:00
Tesla 1856-
No, they fully understood the question because they were on my computer for several hours looking for a solution. It seems that the motherboard is the culprit as there is only 1 PCIe x16 slot and 1 PCIe x8 slot. I do not have any other PCIe cards added and I have tried it with just the NVMe M.2 and the GTX 1080 as that is the way it was built.
Tesla1856
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December 22nd, 2016 16:00
1. Wait a minute ... I don't see a M.2 slot documented for SSD on motherboard layout. Please accurately describe what you have in all slots or take a picture. Is it a M.2 SSD on a PCIe Add-In board?
http://downloads.dell.com/manuals/all-products/esuprt_desktop/esuprt_alienware_dsk/alienware-aurora-r5-desktop_service%20manual_en-us.pdf
2. Thanks for testing that.
I have reported your issue through my available channels.
beamermt79
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December 22nd, 2016 17:00
I've heard of this happening if the chipset or the CPU can't handle 2 full x16 PCIe lanes. I did think that PCIe ssd's only did x4 though?
cherzog1
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December 22nd, 2016 17:00
Page 69 in the manual shows the M.2 slot and drive insertion. The motherboard picture and descriptions are incorrect.
Tesla1856
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December 22nd, 2016 18:00
Right, it might happen when trying to come up with a whole other set of 16, but 4 should be easy to spare.
Tesla1856
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December 22nd, 2016 18:00
Mike202_573885
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December 22nd, 2016 19:00
Just checked my system, and mine is also running the video card at 8x with my NVMe drive. All the controllers (USB 3.1, Intel wireless, Gigabit Ethernet, etc....) eat up all the available lanes, so that means the m.2 slot has to share with the x16 slots. I don't game very much, so I am OK with keeping the m.2 drive which is much faster than a SATA SSD.
Tesla1856
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December 22nd, 2016 20:00
Looks to me like the lanes for video are separate. And a x16 card should only drop down to x8 if two are installed concurrently.
www.tomshardware.com/.../skylake-intel-core-i7-6700k-core-i5-6600k,4252-2.html
Mike202_573885
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December 22nd, 2016 21:00
Tesla,
I think the Aurora is configured in a way that the M.2 slot shares the PCI Expres Graphics lanes. The other spare 20 PCI lanes are likely used up by Thunderbolt, USB 3.1, and the wireless adapter.
Tesla1856
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December 22nd, 2016 23:00
https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Z170-vs-Z97-What-is-the-Difference-636/
Additional PCI-E lanes: 20x PCI-E 3.0
http://www.trustedreviews.com/intel-skylake-review-core-i7-6700k-and-core-i5-6600k-review-intel-hd-graphics-530-and-z170-chipset-page-2
Primary among these is the addition of four PCIe3.0 lanes, making for a total of 20. This greatly opens up the potential throughput of the system for things likes PCIe storage, such as the new Intel SSD 750 series, and Thunderbolt without impacting on the performance of graphics cards.
cherzog1
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December 23rd, 2016 03:00
Tesla,
At this point, it seems that I will need to use a 2 1/2" SATA SSD to get my graphics up to x16. Graphics speed is important and should be running at x16 to get the best performance. Again, I've still got my Sandy Bridge system and the GTX 970 is kicking the GTX 1080's *** in renders and texturing.
I appreciate all of your research on this...guess that I need to make a decision to either keep the machine or return it and build from scratch. Thanks again!
cherzog1
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December 23rd, 2016 03:00
Mike202,
It's good to hear from another Aurora R5 owner and that your GTX1080 is running at x8 also. I thought that it may have been only mine since this issue has not been posted before. Anyway, yes I needed the speed of the M.2 drive, but I really needed the full graphics lanes for the best graphics performance. Why would you accept that your GTX1080 only runs on the PCIe x8 lane? It just makes no sense for a high end system to have such a bottleneck.
I know that most new Z170 boards can run the graphics at x16 and still have the M.2 installed, with the i7-6700K. I'm only using one graphics card, so it just seems that it would run at x16.
Thanks for the information that you had posted-
cherzog1
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December 23rd, 2016 05:00
Benchmark Testing - Scores do not seem too bad comparing with others, any feedback?
Unigine Heaven 4.0
FPS 200.7
Score 5056
Min. FPS 9.6
Max. FPS 355.3
Furmark
Score: 7083
FPS 118
Tesla1856
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December 23rd, 2016 13:00
You are the one that made this original statement:
I have just purchased a new Alienware Aurora R5 full loaded and had discovered that my GTX 1080 Graphics card was running at x8 versus x16 on the PCIe 3.0 lanes. The new GTX 1080 was running slower that my 3 year old GTX 970 in a Sandy Bridge computer.
But you never said how much slower.
Running Heaven both ways on this hardware would be a better metric.
I would not think x8 or x16 would make much of a difference, unless running in 2K or 4K (but who knows ... you might be now or in the future) . Maybe you might want to do some VR. That's why this issue you uncovered is important because motherboard should not be running the video card at only x8 in the first place.