It can very much depend on the motherboard, which on-board SATA ports are being used and which else is in use, like M.2 slots and PCIe slots. The motherboard manual would have notes along the ports/slots etc that says what is either disabled or reduced bandwidth depending on what else is connected/in use.
General desktop CPU’s only have so many PCIe lanes to connect everything. So bandwidth either has to be limited or some connections disabled. It’s one of the main differences between a consumer CPU and a server on. The server chips have a LOT more PCIe lanes.
Did the old machine also have port expansion card, all the drives, etc, since the more hardware you add the more the system has to check at start up and the longer that takes. This applies all the way down to the amount of RAM, 64GB will take longer to boot then 16GB.
In simple terms, Core Memory Isolation forces windows to isolate (basically run a mini virtual system) various base level components like drivers. It helps to protect the system by putting stuff in little silos and anything that tries to access or mess around with those parts gets told to piss off.
The issue, is that the drivers, etc need to be written with this in mind or it just doesn’t work. If they aren’t, a couple of likely things result. So for hardware drivers, the driver just isn’t started up and in turn the hardware then just doesn’t work.
In a worse case, the system and driver get in a big argument and you see a Blue Screen of Death with a troubleshooting boot loop.
By turning it off, (it’s very likely on by default with a new Windows 11 install), you end up with how Windows 10 pretty was from the start.
Still can’t find anything that talks about SATA config. The manual states to go to the website, but I can’t find anything there. I’ll leave it and discuss this with the builder. They’ll have a far better understanding than I’ll ever have.
As for the boot speed, my old machine had as many HDD’s (but no expansion card). I probably need to look in the bios to see if fast boot is enabled. I always worry about going in there.
The core isolation thingee is probably not something I will play with unless I see something that is impacted. So far, I don’t see anything. Great!
Currently doing something new → upscaling some old video. Never had a machine really capable of doing this unless I was willing to wait a decade . Hope to get to watch the upscale tomorrow to check out the result, but looking at it on my PC it looks reasonably impressive. Had to have a break from the setup process, but I’m slowly getting there. Thanks for the insight.
The website should have a full product page for your specific motherboard, with a support section that has a full PDF download of the manual. For example, my MSI X870 Tomahawk has a 87 page PDF manual, that details the impact of SATA, M.2, PCIe, even USB-C ports and what gets limited/disabled, etc.
Had a look on the website but couldn’t find anything extra. I guess until I pull the PC out and have a look it’s all a matter of conjecture. I plan to discuss this with the builder next week when the holiday’s are over.
So yes, based on that, the 4 SATA ports aren’t affected, but the M.2 slots are and even more so the PCIe slots are rather buried into the ground.
So the two secondary M.2 slots share bandwidth if both are filled. Forcing each to only run at PCIe 4 x2. If you only use one of them (M2C or M2B), make sure you use M2B, as that supports x4 if nothing is in M2C.
But the big one is the PCIe slots. While they are all full length on the board they aren’t wired anywhere near that.
Both of the bottom two PCIe slots are only PCIe 3.0 x1, that is really slow. So that’s how Gigabyte has sliced up the lanes/bandwidth. Left the SATA ports alone and mostly left the M.2 slots at good speed. But if you put anything that is high-ish data usage in the bottom two PCie slots, then it will be totally bottlenecked.
Thanks for the heads up. Don’t really understand a lot of it. The SATA expansion card sits in the 2nd slot up from the bottom. Not sure how that will be impacted by what you have written. I only have two things plugged into it → hopefully, the Bluray optical drive and one HDD - the least important ones.
I am hoping the main HDD’s are plugged into the MB ports. I do hope to get the issues with the HDD’s sorted out. Time will tell.
Can’t see which slot the M2 was put in. There is obviously a cover over that area. Maybe it will tell me in the bios?? Need to have a look.
Ultimately, I have settled down from the initial shock of the things I had to compromise on. These are mostly software issues. I have been using the machine while I continue to set it up (and organise files). I have been doing some video upscaling and have been very pleased with the results. The hardware side seems to deal with this arduous task nicely. Still have a long way to go until I get back to my full workflow pipeline. Lots of software to tweak and may too much assets / content to sort through and organise!
I didn’t end up getting the motherboard that was originally suggested. No stock in the country! And there is still not stock in the country. Hopefully, the system won’t be impacted too much. I won’t know, so that is probably for the better.
Hope you’re having a good holiday (if you’re having one). Thanks
A PCIe 3.0 x1 slot can transfer data at a maximum of almost 1 GB a second, so 1000 MB a second.
To put that in a practical term, the good old SATA based SSD will usually do a little over 500 MB a second.
So if you say connected two SSD’s to an expansion card plugged into a PCIe 3.0 x1 slot and tried to read data from both drives at the same time, you would in fact be bottlenecking the performance of the drives, since the PCIe slot isn’t fast enough to transfer the data.
If that’s all, then it should be OK. The Bluray drive tops out at around 20MB/s, while a single HDD is around 250MB/s, so even if using both at the same time, it’s still no where near the max bandwidth available.
This is just what manufactures have to decide on given the limited amount of bandwidth on desktop PC’s. But they can somewhat pick and choose between PCIe slots, SATA ports, M.2 slots and various USB ports, etc.
There’s no right or wrong, just a config that suits one requirements the best.
Ahh…that makes more sense to me. Thanks for the great explanation.
I only have one M2. Everything else is 3.5 HDD.
I have sent an email off to the builder this morning. Hopefully will hear back soon (unless he’s on holiday).
Apart from the SATA config problem, most of my issues are software related I think - weird things like my pdf reader taking 30 seconds to start (this morning)…or not starting at all several days ago. Or Windows explorer taking a minute or more to open a window. Painful stuff that is difficult to find what is happening and almost impossible to fix!
One thing I will ask if you know. I usually surf this forum without being logged in. When I am logged in (like now to reply to your posts) - if I return to a post I’ve already been too, the page will open where I finished reading (not at the top of the page). Any idea how to stop it doing this. I want to to open at the top of the page every time. Doesn’t do this when I’m not logged in. Looked in the settings, but couldn’t find anything.
Hmm, that all sounds a little strange and likely needs more digging into Event Viewer, startup apps, etc.
In theory that’s ideally how it should work, you get sent to any new posts that you haven’t seen/read yet, rather then dropped in at the top of everything one has already read and then forced to scroll down to find the new stuff.
I think the system is just designed to work like that, not sure there is a way to change it.
Yeah…I forget about that. I did have a look, and there are a lot of errors in there. However, I looked at all our computers and there are a lot of errors in all of them. Not sure you can have a Windows installation without errors
When I have more time, I’ll try and have a closer look to see what Event Viewer is trying to tell me.
I thought this might be the case. Best to stay logged out then. Thanks for the input.
Yeah, no, not really, there’s always something. Still, some errors or even just warnings, can be more of an issue then others. Just takes time to investigate.
Had a look in the bios today. If I read it correctly, then my SSD is plugged into the M2C_SB port → not the M2B_SB as you suggested. Could you explain what the port difference is? I found this in the manual. Should I consider changing the port? I’m not really sure what it means.
So…I continue to try and figure out what is happening. The issues continue and they appear to be getting more pronounced each day → like programs not starting…and not just the same program. There be gremlins in the machine I think!
The guy who built it got back from holiday yesterday. I’m in the process of deciding to send it back. There is no doubt in my mind it is NOT working correctly → perhaps a HW issue impacting the SW? Or some SW impacting the HW? I certainly don’t know. I do know that is always feels like it is lagging…like it can’t quite keep up when I’m multi-tasking. In fact, my old PC is still better at doing several things at the same time than this one. For example → if I’m doing something and then go to check a media file with mediainfo, the mediainfo window will will take several seconds to popup, or if I go the rename a file, it won’t highlight instantly like it should (my old machine does this and it’s almost 10 years old). It’s all very strange. This would hands down be the worst PC experience I’ve ever had. It almost feels like the CPU cores aren’t grunty enough to do something else when something is already going on. It’s really frustrating.
Anyway, I think I need to get back to the builder. It’s a major hassle to be honest, but what can you do? I doubt I will get to the bottom of it on my own. I’ve even seriously considered rolling it back to Windows 10. Windows 10 on my old PC as been great and Win 11 is missing so many things Win 10 has. Has I will probably send it back, this is why I asked if I should change the SSD port above. Thanks.
In the most simple of terms, to get the max possible speed out of a modern M.2 NVMe drive, it needs to be plugged into either M2A_CPU or M2B_SB. There should in turn be nothing in M2C_SB.
It should still all work, but just at a possible slower speed.
Not sure that’s a good idea, given that Windows 10 is expected to stop getting security updates later in the year.
It’s almost sounding like a HW issue and my first guess would be the drives/SATA/Power cables.
If it was me, the first thing I’d do is pull the SATA expansion card and unplug any SATA and power cables to normal HDD and Bluray drive.
Leaving nothing but a couple of M.2 drives or better yet, nothing but the single M.2 drive with the OS on it.
Then test the system in Windows, with the same apps, etc and see what happens. Basically try to break it. If you can’t, then you know it’s got something to do with the SATA card/drives, etc.
If it’s still all laggy, then there’s likely some bigger issues.
Thanks for this. I’ve tackfully pointed this out today to the tech. I’m going to send it back next week. PITA to be sure, but I can’t fix it. The tech has told me all the SATA ports were working using multiple HDD’s. It was something I specifically asked them to check before transit, so maybe something got bumped during the ride here via the courier system. They are rough!
The laggy thingee is one of the things that annoys me the most. It shouldn’t take 30secs for a edit panel to open in a piece of software!. It certainly doesn’t on my old machine and that is only a mid-spec i7 that is more than 8 years old. Lets hope they get to the bottom of it. I sure hopes it’s NOT an AMD thing. All my other PC’s have been Intel.
That is what makes me think it’s a issue with the SATA card, cables or drives. It can only take one of those things to have a bit of a fault, which causes Windows to retry and wait for time outs, before it can then do anything else.
I am assuming that its got nothing to do with any power saving settings. As in the HDD’s are asleep and hence any drive/file type panel or rename, etc will basically just lockup for 10-20s while the drive fully powers back up out of sleep mode.
Really shouldn’t be, on my second Ryzen CPU and not had any such problems and not really read any such things happening in general.
Yeah…it’s certainly getting funky. I am going to pull it out of the trolley over the weekend and have a look. I’m planning on putting in different HDD’s when I send it back so all my data is safe. That should also let me see if I can spot anything on the inside of the machine.
I have all the power settings set to never powerdown (sleep). I have wondered about the power plan though. It’s currently set to balanced and NOT performance. Not sure it’ll make any difference. There are a lot of weird things happening. Yesterday when I booted up, all the icons on my desktop were unpainted → there was only a placeholder showing were they were. Never had that before.
The tech has stated they have never had a PC acting this weird before either, but has pretty much guaranteed me they will get to the bottom of it.
I’ve never had one, so I have no experience with them. All the PC’s we have had over the decades have all be Intel ones. I brought my wife a new PC last year → i7, 32gb RAM 3060 → and it is way smooth to use and actually feels fast (compared to this one). I always feel like I am waiting for this one to catch up - a hesitation before it performs the action I have asked. One problem is that I don’t have the vocab to voice the things it is doing.
Anyway, it’s going back. I really hope the find what is causing it. They have said they are going to do a complete re-install of the OS as well. That’s about a months worth of effort down the gurgler. I’ll have to start from scratch → something I’m happy to do → if it gets it all working like I expect it to. The spec is huge compared to my old PC, yet I find myself feeling my old PC just works better on everyday tasks.
I’m trying NOT to be disappointed, but after the effort and the expense I think there is definitely some feeling there!
Well, the icons are all read from each of the exe files of the apps they point to. So we are back to the same storage system and cables, etc and how it can just take one to mess things up.
My power settings are on Balanced as well, so that’s fine. For the most part half of it makes little difference on a desktop system with mains power. A fair few of the settings and hence difference in power plans can really only be noticeable on something like a laptop.
Well that would mean the SSD is perhaps suspect? It has test okay though, but I really don’t know. The store can sort it out now. I’m done stressing about it! Public holiday on Monday here, so I’ll pull it out then and have a gander. Now I have the fantastic task of moving all my emails and stuff back to my old pc. Thanks
. Hope to get to watch the upscale tomorrow to check out the result, but looking at it on my PC it looks reasonably impressive. Had to have a break from the setup process, but I’m slowly getting there. Thanks for the insight.
