ASRock Z97 Extreme6 Motherboard Review (w/ Samsung XP941 M.2 SSD)

ASRock's Ultra M.2 connection uses four PCIe 3.0 lanes from an LGA 1150 CPU's total of sixteen. As such, populating the Ultra M.2 slot forces a graphics card's bandwidth to be dropped to PCIe 3.0 x8 (when a single card is used).

We ran our gaming benchmarks to observe what affect, if any, the reduced bandwidth had on graphics performance.

Going from a PCIe 3.0 x16 link to an x8 connection does have a slight impact on performance, but the reduced frame rate numbers are largely negligible.

The numbers shown in the chart are sacrifices that many people are going to be willing to accept in order to obtain the 32Gbps Ultra M.2 link.

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