Asus Z790 Hero: bifurcation and high speed networking

Hello everybody,

I just thought I would share a nice fact about the Asus Z790 Hero and its last PCH connected PCIe slot. Fun fact you do not have to use the Asus add in card for bifurcation, I bought a dual U.2 to pcie x8 adapter and enabled x4 x4 in the bios to create a 905P raid 0 array for my windows install.

I am also trying to run an intel 25Gbits/s nic in the second x8 pcie slot, xxv710 da2 but I am struggling to get 25Gbits/s send speeds from my machine to the Truenas scale iperf3 server (running iperf3 with the reverse will get me 17Gbits/s or so rather than the 9 Gbits/s I’m seeing when sending from my desktop to the server)


Strangely, when using a regular old samba share on my Truenas I can get the 25gbps both ways…

fromDesktopToServer

Just thought I would share about the bifurcation working with an amazon u.2 adapter… The Q1T1 performance doesn’t improve much from using Intel VMD Raid … but the latency stays low which is nice. If you have any ideas about getting full 25Gbits/s iperf3 results both ways please share.

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Hi,

I have an asus z790, but I haven’t been able to get bifurcation working. Could you share which dual U.2 to pcie x8 adapter you used and screenshots of your bios changes?

I’d really appreciate it. :slight_smile:

Howdy,

This is the card that I bought on Amazon for dual u.2

I’m using two Optane 905p’s.

You have to have the card in the bottom most pcie x16 slot (G4) and there is a setting in the bios that sets that slot to x4/x4 bifurcation. It is located at

Advanced >> onboard devices configuration >> pciex16(g4) configuration.

If you set that to dual m.2 ssd… both nvme devices should show up in the bios and you can make a raid array with vid if you want.

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How did u raid them? Is there a setting in the bios? Which software allows you to configure two optane drives as raid?

It’s called intel vmd in the bios. There is a level one video talking about it for the z690 boards if I am not mistaken.

Basically you enable the vmd thing for the cpu, and then reboot the bios… when you re enter bios there will be a vmd setup option and you can make your raid array.

I wonder if there is a way to do this on am5. What would happen if i slipped this card into a x670e hero? Would only one of the drives show up?

If I understand correctly… the raid support on amd is very bad. Don’t do it to yourself!