Review on Electop Adapter Express Expansion Compatible by Andrew Schobinger

Just to give a little background, I built my computer in 2015, I'm using Intel i7-4790K From overclocked to 4.6GHz with Cooler Master Hyper Evo 212, ASUS Z97-AR mobile device, 32 GB G.Skill ARES DDR3-2400 MHz (11-13-13-31), 250 GB Samsung Evo 850 SSD and 2 GB EVGA Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 SSC. So my build isn't the newest, but it still holds its own in every department except the GPU. to a new building if I decide to do so in the next few years. The first upgrade was a 500GB Western Digital SN750 with an NVMe SSD heatsink. I was able to get a 500GB WD SN750 with a heatsink for $90, which I think is a pretty good deal considering NVMe got pretty hot. Get the 500GB heatsink model. For this reason I am NOT using the heatsink that came with the kit. For that reason I can't speak to the ability of this product to stay cool with the included thermal pads and heatsink, but it seems to be of decent quality (nothing amazing and certainly not as good as the OEM heatsink from EKWB on my SN750 ). I'll keep this in case I need it for additional NVMe in future builds. I did this because my Samsung Evo SATA SSD was almost full and also to get a faster and bigger boot drive. The problem is that since I have a motherboard that is 5-6 years old, it predates NVMe SSDs. Fortunately, ASUS made a BIOS update that allowed NVMe to work in the onBoard M.2 slot on all Z97 and Z99 boards in 2016. However, my built-in M.2 slot only works with PCIe 2.0 x2. This add on board allowed me to use the WD SN750 with a PCI 2.0 x8 interface in my third PCIe x16 slot (the 3rd PCIe x16 slot on my motherboard is PCIe 2.0 only) OR PCIe 3.0 x4 in the second PCIe x16 -Slot to run . . While I was concerned that using the second PCIe 3.0 x16 slot would affect my GPU and future GPU (next update), I did a little research and found that the FPS impact was less than 1% most of the time when I played at high speeds. 1440p or lower with x8 GPU. Because of this I decided to use the second PCIe slot to get full speed. Please note that you CANNOT boot from this add-on if your motherboard does not support M.2 SSD. You CAN use it for storage (research) but you CANNOT boot from it. I was lucky that ASUS was such an early M.2 adapter and was able to deliver a simple BIOS update to support NVMe. Again, if you have an ASUS Z97 or Z99, all of these boards have received BIOS updates to support NVMe, but if you don't have a native M.2 slot, you CANNOT BOOT FROM THEM YET. If you have your own M.2 slot, you probably need to tweak some settings in BIOS to boot from NVMe. I had to adjust the CSM options as well as some other "boot" and "advanced" options in the BIOS. To give you an idea of the speed improvement, my Samsung Evo 850 had a sequential read speed of 530MB/s. With the M.2 slot built in, the WD SN750 hit a top speed of 830Mbps, which is still a big improvement and worth the upgrade considering I can use it on my next build as well. After getting this add-on card to use my second PCIe 3.0 x16 slot with PCIe 3.0 x4, my NVMe hits 3300MB/s. I haven't tested the PCIe 2.0 x8 slot, but I can surmise that it will probably be around 1800Mbps. Pictures are attached, fig. 1 now, fig. 2 uses the built-in M.2 PCIe 2.0 x2, and fig. 3 - SATA SSD. I will update this review if there are any issues with the addon and add PCIe 2.0 x8 slot speed. , I'm doing fan maintenance and will be postponing some things so I'll test them badly in the future. All in all I would definitely recommend this product to anyone who has an extra PCIe 2.0 or 3.0 x16 slot that isn't being used, especially if your phone natively supports M.2 which allows you to boot from an extra card, AND will not run at PCIe 2.0 x8 or PCIe 3.0 x4 speeds. A great investment for the price and I also like that this device is NOT an add-on that takes up an extra slot on the back of the case, it just sits in the PC. One downside I want to mention is that the expansion card has some bright blue LEDs that turn on and off every few seconds. I hardly see it in my use case, but it could be a deciding factor for someone investing heavily in their building's aesthetics. I WILL UPDATE THIS REVIEW IF THERE ARE PROBLEMS.