Optiplex 3060, SAMSUNG 970 EVO, PCIe 2.0 x 4

Just wanted to post that I have the *exact* same problem with both the Samsung 970 Pro (3,500/2,700 MB/s) and the ADATA SX8200 Pro (3,500/3,000 MB/s) NVMe SSDs, and it's quite clear (that for whatever reason) the PCIe slot on the Optiplex 3060 is limited to PCIe 2.0 x4 rather than the PCIe 3.0 x4 specs of the user 3060 manual and the Intel chipset.

I slapped both of these into my Latitude and benchmarked using a USB drive and both jumped back up to near rated speeds and were certainly performing on the PCIe 3.0 bus.

I have contacted Dell about this issue and have a Case # and I implore everyone else with this issue to do the same - only with an adequate number of complaints will Dell do anything about this flaw.

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@Ziggy32 wrote:
I have re-read all the articles in this thread a couple times and there are some wonderful, very technical explanations but can someone put it in layman terms? If the manual says it is PCIe 3 x4 NVME, Up to 32 Gbps then did Dell miss-advertise? Where is the bottleneck? The bus? the slot?

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Good question, and it could be anything from a BIOS limitation to a hardware flaw to someone substituting a cheaper part on the motherboard, but I am really hoping it's software-based and can be fixed.

It's truly bizarre that older systems like the Optiplex 3050 run at PCIe 3.0 speeds yet the newer 3060 cannot.

I can't believe I wasted all this time and money buying top-end PCIe 3.0 NVMe drives with 3K+ read/write specs, when they're essentially running on 2014 interface hardware.

I spent all of 3 minutes to find the support documents for the 3060 Optiplex. I don't even own a Dell...

Anyways, the H370 chipset supports 20 lanes and you need to count up how many lanes all of your IO hardware are using. 

Problem solved. (Probably)

Further clarification...

The H370 supports 20 I/O lanes and your CPU supports  16 PCI-E lanes.

So depending what slots you're using for the hardware you have I stalled... Bandwidth could suffer quite a bit.

I suggest posting a full list of hardware and what slots you have them connected to.

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@RoxxiaDK wrote:

I spent all of 3 minutes to find the support documents for the 3060 Optiplex. I don't even own a Dell...

Anyways, the H370 chipset supports 20 lanes and you need to count up how many lanes all of your IO hardware are using. 

Problem solved. (Probably)

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LOL, that's 3 minutes of your life you wasted, as Dell Engineering has already told us why this is happening, and I have reposted it in several threads.

Basically, the 3060 does NOT include a full H370, but a "stripped-down" version that only utilizes PCI 2.0 on the system bus. So we do get x4 lanes, but only on PCIe 2.0. Dell is going to adjust the online and PDF specifications to fit this new reality.

It's the same story with the 5060, which features a stripped-down Q370 with PCI 2.0, and the 7060 is apparently the only Optiplex from this generation to get a full chipset implementation and NVMe speeds of PCIe 3 x4.

Hopefully this clears things up for you.

Just in case you missed the answer straight from Dell Engineering:

As I posted in another thread, it's a hardware limitation of both the Optiplex 3060 and 5060 - they used "scaled down" versions of the Intel chipsets that limit their ability to hit the specifications of the NVMe PCIe 3.0 x4 bus. Essentially they have a fully-featured H370/Q370 chipset for the CPU/Memory bus, but a "scaled down" PCI 2.0 design for the system bus.

So that means CPU and memory benchmarks will be consistent with other PCs, but overall NVMe performance is shaved in half.

It's "market segmentation" at it's worst, whereby if you want that kind of performance, you need to get a 7060 - the only problem is that Dell told us all that NVMe PCIe 3.0 x4 is supported on the 3060, right in the specifications. Too bad that was an "error".

The idiots at Dell. The problem still exists on the 3070. You have to go all the way up to the 3070 to avoid it. I am sure Dell's sutpidity will continue in to the next model.

Sorry to revive this old thread. But does the PCI 2.0 speeddown only manifest on the NVME slot or is it also present on the PCI-E slot(s)? If not would a PCI-E to NVME adapter give the full speed?

And this dumbing down of the NVME speed is only present on Optiplex 3060 and 5060, but not on the generation before like 3050 and 5050? And how about the new generation of 3070 and 5070?

Dell blocking any upgrade path of the Coffee lakes to the Coffee lake refresh by not updating the microcode is a punch into the face of the customer. But they still state in their documents that 3060, 5060 and 3070, 5070 have "PCIe 3 x4 NVMe with up to 32Gbit/s" which obviously is not just wrong but a plain lie as they are aware of the situation for more than a year and still advertise that way.

I do use clover. But the limitation is in the hardware of the bus. As i understand it an PCI-E-NVME adapter for the PCI x16 Slot should do the trick tho as this should be a real x16 and not a dumbed down PCI-E 2 x4 as is the NVME.

I know this isn't exactly an answer but I have researched about using nvme as a boot drive in systems that don't have the capability. The answer was to use clover boot loader. I have not tried this myself but I seen no mention of anyone getting slower speeds out of their board. Would it be worth a shot to test this out on a board that's supposed to support nvme to see if you get your 3.0 speeds?

Yes that's what I was thinking. You would be using up a pcie slot which hopefully you don't need but I think the adapters are cheap. Another downside is don't you have to use clover on a flash drive that's always connected? I know this is a rather b/s work around for a system that shouldn't need it.

Dell really, really . Problem was not corrected in the Optiplex 3070 and just tested an Optiplex 3080. Problem still there. On the good side Dell is consistent. On the bad side consistently horrid.