is eco mode an option somewhere in the bios… or do I have to find the pbo settings?
do you have screenshots?
thanks!
I feel like I am losing my mind with this motherboard. I cannot get both M.2 drives to show up at the same time in the BIOS. My goal is to run them in RAID 1 so have a 1-to-1 backup of my VMs. However I can only get one to show up at a time. If I take the left one out, the right shows up in BIOS (sometimes). If I take the right one out, the left shows up in BIOS (sometimes). If both drives are in, only one will show up in BIOS. I tried booting to both Windows 10 and UnRaid, both will only show one of the drives. The IPMI storage page shows both of them all the time.
I also have issues with the RAM only going to 2133, but I can live with that as long as I can get the RAID working properly.
I am using a 3800x, two WD blue NVMe 500GB drives, and two 16GB 3600MHz DDR4 non-ecc DIMMS (but they run at 2133)
Please help me with this storage problem, I created a ticket with ASROCKRACK support, but I am awaiting response.
Im using both the m.2 slots on mine x470d4u… dont remember if I had to jump thru any hoops to get them both to show up.
GL
Thanks for your reply. What brand drives do you have? and what bios are you on?
is eco mode an option somewhere in the bios… or do I have to find the pbo settings?
do you have screenshots?
thanks!
I am not seeing anything that is obviously “Eco mode”. This is what the PBO Bios options look like after selecting Advanced
for the NVMe issues: maybe the issue drive or slot specific? Can you try both drive in both slots one at a time (4 configurations)? Maybe those drives do not like that one slot gives them 2x PCIe link.
For the DDR4 issues: this board does not have XMP profiles (not a gaming board). 3200 should work but you post likely need to go into the OC menu (DRAM timing configuration section) and set frequency to 1600 Mhz (values in this menu are not doubled)
One drive should use the CPU PCIe lanes and the other one those from the chipset. If you have SATA devices connected, those might be eating up your chipset lanes. Alas, you can use 2 NVMe drives at X2 speeds.
Also, what does this setting do?
Disabling this option should help.
There’s also a beta BIOS from 2020 that you can try.
False, even the manual you have linked says so. look at the block diagram and the m.2 section. On this board both m.2 slots are wired to the chipset.
one is operating at PCIe gen2 x4 link
another is either PCIe gen3 x2 or SATA3 (depending on the drive used)
This is a test/debug option that was left for some reason.
In the bios you can find its description: “[Chipset] Pcie Lanes route to Chipset CHIP; [CPU] Pcie Lane route to CPU PCIE. Note: This is a test option and the board should be reworked.”
edit: Actually, maybe it’s the other way around - the description was unchanged but the board was reworked.
I forgot to say generally.
Yeah, I figured, most board have it that way, I just didn’t someone to be confused by this.
Going back to that pcielane switch option. I don’t know for sure what the ‘PT chip’ stands for but I presume it could be about “Processor Trace” and would have been used for debugging chipset/CPU firmware.
iirc 3.20
I have two Intel 660p drives
If I were you, I’d update the BIOS and SSDs’ firmwares just to be on the safe side.
The latest version for the 660p SSDs is 004C.
I remember reading somewhere about weird Intel SSD behavior before.
1 Like
One more thing to try: disable inventory support in the server mgmt menu, maybe the IPMI is having issues with those drives.
There are a couple of people in this thread that reported weird behavior related to this option:
So I tried both drives in both slots, switched them, ran them both individually in both slots. Both drives work, and both slots work, just not at the same time. AsRock Support recommended I try an older BIOS because it changed M.2 compatibility. I have now tried 3.10 all the way to the beta 3.37 and nothing has changed.
Also these are the only drives that are in the motherboard at the moment. Maybe I can try adding a SATA drive and see if that makes the motherboard perform more nominal.
@Tenrag I am going to try messing with those BMC settings and will follow up here.
1 Like
I couldn’t find the edit button for my last post. So here is the update.
I turned off the Server Management - Inventory support BIOS setting, It did not improve my situation. I did validate that it worked as the BMS no longer shows installed hardware and now says “disabled in BIOS”. This was tested on BIOS 3.10 and then again on 3.37(beta). Both with a full shutdown from the power supply to weed out issues when the BMS boots up. Still nothing.
I have tried plugging in a standard SATA HDD, It appeared, but both M.2’s did not appear simultaneously. The single drive still appears.
Somehow in all this mess, I managed to dislodge some funky-ness with the RAM frequency. Previously setting the DRAM frequency to 1600mhz did nothing, however it is actually booted into 3200MHz now. So that’s nice, I just wish that I could get these M.2 drives working properly.
I have replied to AsRockRack support with my findings, hopefully they send helpful updates.
I’m all confused with those PCIe/Chipset lanes. I have one NVMe drive. I’m buying 2-4 SATA drives (not SSD, cold storage). This should not impact my nvme performance, right?
Next I’m attaching an RTX 3070 to the PCIe with smaller ‘lanes count’ - I use it for GPU passthrough (not for gaming though). I guess GPU when you’re doing calculations doesn’t impact PCIe throughput, right? I will need a usb3.0 riser - I currently run older Radeon on PCIE6, since GPU in PCIE4 covers LED/buttons pin headers and I don’t want to hack the cables or solder anything 
So I’ll put the 3070 on a riser since I’ve got extra 4 slots of space in my 4U case.
Finally - I’d like to buy Asus MB Zub ASUS HYPER M.2 X16 CARD V2 into the PCIe and move the NVMe into this card to fully utilize speed of ADATA XPG SX8200. Will I have enough throuput to stick another (same) 2TB XPG into Asus card and have it run at full speed?
If, say, couple of NVMe max out PCIe lanes via Asus card - will this cause poor performance with GPU?
Rough calculations:
- max chipset usable lanes == 32
- asus with 2x nvme == 8 lanes
- gpu == 8 lanes
- SATA == 4 lanes???
How do I know which are chipset lanes and the other ones?
Also - according to wikichip my CPU has only x4 lanes for storage (NVMe/SATA)? Does this mean using more than 1 nvme will result in capped speed?
New non-beta bios is now available, it seems. No sha256, just like the previous version.
1 Like