Subj : MSI H97 motherboard quirk
To   : All
From : Ky Moffet
Date : Tue Sep 24 2024 11:48:00

If you should own one of these, you will run into this. So:

Someone gift me an MSI "H97 Gamer 3" board and CPU, supposedly dead of 
heat exhaustion. Nothing wrong with it that learning how to mount a CPU 
cooler couldn't fix. (More than half the heatsink wasn't even touching 
the CPU.)

Reasonably competent middle-aged board, could take a much faster CPU and 
more RAM, so for minimal investment I significantly upgraded both. It is 
now a Xeon 3.6GHz maxed out at 32GB RAM (gamer boards are often rather 
limited that way, because no game uses more than 16GB... a holdover from 
games needing to also run on PlayStation. So if you need lots of RAM, 
buy a workstation board instead. Also, many gamer boards don't actually 
support TWO banks of dual-channel RAM, and will have odd issues with 4 
sticks, unless underclocked. This one, fortunately, lacks that issue.)

It has an onboard m.2 slot, so I grabbed the brand new NVMe I had to 
hand and into the slot it goes. Nothing. Pretty sure the system sees it, 
but ... no workee.

<scratching head>

So I put the NVMe on a PCIe slot card, and it works just fine.

<scratching head>

<consults MSI forum guru>

Turns out that while the PCIe bus supports a four-lane (x4) NVMe (or at 
least is compatible enough to work), the NVMe slot does not. It only 
supports two-lane (x2). It was possibly the first consumer board with an 
onboard NVMe slot of any description, and apparently did not occur to 
anyone that NVMe specs would progress apace with the PCIe bus. Nor that 
anyone would be repurposing an 8 year old gamer motherboard as a 
workstation.

It is now very hard to find a two-lane NVMe that's not been used to 
death; all those in current production are x4. Best I could do was 
new-old-stock m.2-style SSD (which the m.2 slot theoretically also 
supports, we'll see.)

===

Something clever that so far I've only seen on MSI boards (but not this 
one):

VERTICAL NVMe slots. But so far only one per board.

Next step, one would think, is a bank of these, rather than just one. 
But each NVMe takes away two SATA ports, and they need to be secured so 
they don't jump out, so there's some engineering yet to do. (Would also 
be easier to keep cool than when flat on the mainboard.)

However, Asus has workstation boards with 3 NVMe flat-mounts and 4 SATA 
ports, so it's not insur--uh--mountable.
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