📈 ASUS Hyper M.2 X16 PCIe 3.0 X4 Expansion Card V2: Boost Your NVMe Storage with Intel VROC and AMD Ryzen Threadripper NVMe Raid Support Review

Great item. There is an Asrock version, but it needs a PCIe power connector to connect. This one from ASUS is not. Note, however, that your use requires available PCIe lanes and the ability to set PCIe lane bifurcation in the BIOS. If you only have an X8 slot or 8 PCIe lanes, you can only use two NVMe drives. If you have 16 tracks, you can use all 4 discs. Using my Threadripper, I placed an RTX 2060 in an X8 slot. I'm not a gamer but it still pushes my 3 4K panels into the X8. I then have 11…

This card is intended to provide access to multiple M.2 SSDs via PCI Express. When installed on my system, it only provided an SSD. The product comes with minimal installation instructions and it was not possible to get technical support from Asus. The Asus chat rep suggested I contact the manufacturer of my MB and cut me off. There is no support information for this product on their website, at least I couldn't find it. In addition, the site has many bugs that make it almost impossible to…

This card is NOT optimized for PCIE 4.0! For those who don't know, each NVMe drive in this card requires 4 PCIe 3.0 lanes. Each of these lines operates at 984.6 MB/s. So you need 4x 984.6 MB/s = 3.938 MB/s per NVMe drive. Because of this, this card requires 16 lanes in PCIe 3.0 BUT now with PCIe 4.0 each lane runs at twice the speed of PCIe 3.0, i.e. 1969 MB/s per lane. So 2x PCIe 4.0 lanes = 4x PCIe 3.0 lanes. With PCIe 4.0, you only need 8 lanes of PCIE 4.0 to run all 4 NVMe drives. But on…

Product works very well. V2 adds a second phase of performance in case you're wondering. I have both versions and they work fine. You just need to know if your motherboard supports X4X4X4X4 or X4X4 bifurcation for four or two drives respectively. This will most likely be difficult if you are using a dedicated graphics card with a desktop setup. If you are using onboard video this should be fine, or use it in a HEDS X399/X299 setup where you have available PCIE lanes.

To be honest I don't know how ASUS makes money from this. The aluminum heatsink is large and comes with thermal pads from which you only need to remove the protective film. I'm honestly considering buying another one as it seems too good to be true. This has to be done by a small internal ASUS team that has not yet been discovered as the value of this card is very high. It kept two of my 1TB 970 EVO Plus drives below 40C for over 2 hours of the RAID conversion I was doing during the upgrade…

I thought this card was too good to be true. I needed a mechanism to combine 4 NVME disks for a software raid and this seemed to fit the bill. The package includes the card, pre-installed thermal pads, and the M.2 screws needed to mount the drives. Of course, after the first boot in UEFI only 1 of the 4 drives was recognized. This was because the PCIe slot on my motherboard was set to x16. Thanks to the X399 Taichi's bifurcation support, I was able to set the slot to 4x4x4x4. After saving and…