Header banner
Revain logoHome Page
Cedric Ziebart photo
Macao, North Las Vegas
1 Level
720 Review
37 Karma

Review on πŸ’₯ ASUS Hyper M.2 X16 PCIe 4.0 X4 Expansion Card: Supports 4 NVMe M.2 (2242/2260/2280/22110) up to 256Gbps, Compatible with AMD 3rd Ryzen sTRX40, AM4 Socket, and Intel VROC NVMe Raid by Cedric Ziebart

Revainrating 3 out of 5

Works with Asus TUF Gaming X570 Plus motherboard. BUT

Contrary to some reviews, I used this board with an Asus TUF Gaming X570 Plus motherboard and it works!1. It worked with 4 NVMEs, but you need to use the PCIEx16_1 slot and set the BIOS for slot 2 to AMD RAID. You can use both PCIE3 and PCIE4 NVME and both will run at their respective speeds. NVME PCIE4 is not downgraded when used with NVME PCIE 3. I tried two PCIE 4 (Samsung 980 Pro 1 and 2TB) and two PCIE 3 (Intel 660P and WD SN550) and everything works fine. Note: To achieve PCIE 4 speed, the whole chain from NVME to adapter, motherboard, chipset and CPU must be fully PCIE4 compliant. If your CPU doesn't support PCIE4, you only get PCIE3.3 speed even with X570MB. The fan can be turned off, and even without it, Samsung's temperature ranges from 30Β°C during light drive access to 40Β°C when cloning drives. Even in a stress test, they worked for just over 50 seconds. The large heatsink block works great without a fan.4. The price is reasonable for a PCIE4 adapter that can hold 4 NVMe.5 modules. The heatsink is well made and the circuit board is of good quality. If this card works so well, why am I only giving it 4 stars? Because there are BUTs and there are many of them. In fact, I was really tempted to give it THREE stars! 1. This card works with Asus' own X570 motherboard but ONLY with PCIEX16_1 slot! It will NOT work in a PCIEX16_2 slot! Not only is this NOT clear from the manual, but this is a lousy project by Asus engineers! The PCIE X16_1 slot is usually used for GPU cards, and in most cases, decent GPU performance is twice as wide. MB usually makes room for the next GPU slot, not the PCIEx16_2 slot. If you want this card to use slot 1 and you don't use an APU, the GPU in slot 2 will cover the PCIEx1 slot! You should design this card to use any slot! Suppose it is some chipset limitation, both MB and this card are Asus products, they should have corresponding MB layout, but their engineers are just lazy.2. Speaking of bad tech, this card is HUGE and unnecessary. This also shows that the Asus engineers are very lazy. They could and should have redesigned the layout to make this board much shorter. So you need to estimate the size of this map before purchasing it to make sure you have enough free space for it.3. Rather than designing something without tools like their MB's NVME slot, Asus engineers insist that the user work with small screws. Many of them! To remove the heatsink you need to unscrew 6 small screws and then one more for each NMVE. It shouldn't be that hard to design without tools, but then again, Asus engineers are too lazy or nobody cares. Some people might think it doesn't really matter, you just have to do it once and you're done. Wrong, I plan to use this map for backup and frequent sharing. I've used a tool-less USB to NVME adapter, but even with USB 3.2, it's not as fast as a PCIE interface. Bottom line, it works. But instead of a great product, the laziness or carelessness of Asus' engineers and product managers made it perfectly acceptable to me and perhaps unusable to others.

Pros
  • Quality construction
Cons
  • Requires socket