Why don’t all participants here open support tickets with asus for 8x+8x? Surely that’s better than only one, right?
Squeaky wheel getting attention, and all…
I’m reaching out today
EDIT: Well, I see now why ASUS support has a poor reputation. Immediate response from rep: “OK we will add it to the firmware soon” - “Great, is there some way I can track this request, to find out when it is put on a roadmap, if testing is needed, notification of release, etc?” - “No, that is handled by higher level support. We have no communication with them” - “So how will the product team know this has been requested?” - “I will communicate it to them” … “OK……” - would not provide any direct or indirect escalation path, even with a registered SN on my account
This info about slots 5-7 being different on the WRX90E-Sage is very interesting to me. I am using multiple PCIe-U.2 adapters for 4x U.2 SSDs (so needing to be x4x4x4x4). For a while I thought some of my adapters were bad because only the first 3 drives on the adapter would be detected. But I later discovered that it only happens in slot 5. Same adapters work just fine, x4x4x4x4, in slots 1-4.
Slot 6 (which is 8x) can field a 2x adapter with x4x4 bifurcation just fine.
Never tried bifurcating slot 7, as it’s the obvious choice for the GPU.
Thankfully in my use case I have things that don’t need bifurcation I can put in all of those slots (mellanox NIC, HBA and my GPU in slot 7). Slots 1-4 are enough for all my U.2 drives.
I suspect they should never have tried to push everything with full PCIe slots. A lot of the server boards can push that much IO just fine with Epyc boards using MCIO where needed. But they may think of the WRX platform as some kind of prosumer thing, and want to provide full PCIe slots for easy compatibility.
FYI- I finally made some progress with Asus. I accidentally succeeded in escalating a request by asking for x8/x8 in a mostly unrelated RMA ticket (which ended up not being an RMA, anyway…)
On July 3, I received this:
According to our higher department that regarding the specification attached
Why did you want x8/x8? What type of card did you install? Please provide model and link for the card We need it to have custom bios.
What custom bios did you want? latest version?
Sounds very promising, like they’re willing to provide a build. My response was along the lines of:
I prefer the BIOS immediately before 0904 for now, until I can test 0904, at which point I would like 0904
I will use a C-Payne MCIO x16 → x8/x8 → two device adapters, each with an RTX3090 running @ PCIe 4.0 x8. This is to maximize PCIe slot use, I’m out of slots
I didn’t mention a specific slot - and they didn’t ask- so I’m hoping they add it for all of them (excluding the slot already limited to x8, obviously)
I also asked if I could privately share the firmware they provide. If they’re ok with that, I will make a note here once I receive it, and send to those interested via private message.
I’m pretty excited to finally be close to getting this…
… and that was actually the second time I was asked. I think it’s because there are many users who are confused about bifurcation and ask for things like this for their storage. Because the first time it was “why do you need x8/x8, m.2 is x4” I hadn’t mentioned storage or m.2, it was just assumed)
