My specs are as follows:
Asus X99 Deluxe II
Intel Xeon CPU E5-2698 v3 @ 2.30GHz (40 Lane)
128GB ECC memory
4 x HDD Raid2
3 x HDD Raid1
1 x OS Running Truenas Scale on NVME on Slot 2 (3 if you include the small one covered by the GFX card)
8 x NVME on PCIe Slots 3 & 5 (4 & 6 if you include the small one covered by the GFX card)
So I downloaded this custom BIOS and managed to get it installed via flashback. I have 2 x PCIe devices with 4 NVMEs on them, I can see 5 NVMEs and not 8. Well, I can see 6, one being my bootable NVME drive.
They are in the following order:
PCIe1 (GFX card)
PCIe2 (covered by GFX card, the small PCIe slot)
PCIe3(2) my bootable NVME drive
PCIe4(3) (4 x NVME) I can see all 4 of them.
PCIe5(4) - empty
PCIe6(5) (4 x NVME) I only see 1, I want to see 4.
I have re-arranged them in all sorts of ways and I even followed the guide to change all lanes to 4x4x4x4 (installed via flashback failed so used this method), I even tried to use the M.2 slot on the board but the NVME in the M.2 slot would not show up no matter what BIOS settings I changed to. I was using the M.2 slot before updating the bios to the one in the link above.
I see the GFX card is 16x in the bios and I see the slots occupied are 4x. I have tried moving them to different PCIe slots but would only see 1 drive in each, but 4 x drives in the PCIe 3 slot (4 if you include the smaller PCIe slot). According to the link I downloaded the BIOS from, PCIe slot 5 (6 if you include the small one), was set to be 4x4x4x4, but that is not 4x4x4x4 as I only see 1 NVME drive.
Can someone point me in the right direction, or what am I doing wrong? I would like to use all 8 of the NVME drives, did I use up all the 40 CPU lanes?
OK, so I tried to follow this guide and I got my 4 values of 0x533, 0x534, 0x535 & 0x536, but when I boot into RU and searched for IntelSetup I find it and go into it. But how do I use the HexEditor to change those values? I don’t know how to convert those to hex, thanks. He says the variable is an address, how do I know what address it is? Thanks.
EDIT, I tried to use the setup_var IntelSetup 0x537 0x0, but all values were already set to 0x0, oh well, I give up now. At least I know PCIe slots 1 and 3 can see all 4 drives on one card as I moved them around to see what ports worked.
PCIe2 is not the 1x small port covered by your gfx card. M.2 slot above the sata ports should not be used and is sharing resources with pcie3. Count your lanes, I know for a fact that I had to turn of many resources and yet I’m maxed out on the 40 lanes. PCIe ports are 1-5, don’t count the 1x covered by your gfx card. I’ve only achieved a total of 9 nvme m.2’s. you must also use the asus bios converter app (BRenamerl.exe) to change the modded .cap file into a genuine flash file.
PCIe1 (GFX card)
PCIe2 (Asus M.2 hyper x4 card)
PCIe3 (Asus M.2 hyper x16 card v1 4X NVME)
PCIe4 (4 x NVME) I can see all 4 of them.
PCIe5 - GIGABYTE TITAN RIDGE Thunderbolt 3 V2
All credit goes to Win-Raid Forum
Techpowerup
Davidm71
Frogger
Lost_N_BIOS
Javen, THANK YOU!!!
Thank you for answering, I have disabled a few things (UBS3 ports) as I do not use them and a few other things I don’t use like Wifi and Bluetooth, but not sure what else I should disable. I only use one USB port for my Conbee Stick for Home Assistant.
I also disabled one SATA port as that is broken on my motherboard, but I am using the other 9. Do you by any chance have a list of what you disabled on your setup? I could move my boot NVME to the 9th SATA port as that is just the transcoding disk I use for transcoding files.
I am not sure yet where to find what parts on my motherboard use the 40 lanes. Or could someone point me in the right direction for this?
All of the apps and guides are in this website. I do not have a list but I suggest you fine tune your setting to what you need. I know it’s not easy but you are better off understanding the process by following the guides. Find hwinfo.exe, amibcp.exe, and asus beareal.exe bios flash converter. These apps are required.
Thank you @Dev24670 I have already installed your Bios version via Flashback and even modified the name to see if it did flash, and it did. I am sure it has something to do with the PCIe lanes and some settings somewhere in the BIOS are taking up lanes where I don’t need them, as you said before in your first post here, thanks for sharing your BIOS. I’ll try to figure it out.
The guide in conjunction with the apps are how you will be able to understand the process to edit your pcie resources. You might only want pcie slot 1 to be 4x.