For future Asus X79-Deluxe owners:
Using a bifurcation PCIe x16 to 4x4x4x4 NVMe adapter (mine is made by iocrest: link here), I am currently unable to get bifurcation to resolve the number of installed drives. It will show one fewer than the number of installed drives.
If I install two drives, only a single one shows in BIOS. If I install three then the BIOS will see two. I don’t have enough spare NVMe drives in order to populate all 4 slots and see what happens.
Hardware:
- i7-4820k
- GTX 1070 top slot (I believe IOU2 - PCIe x16_1)
- PCIe x16_2 (full x16; I believe IOU3, enabled as 4x4x4x4 in BIOS) - tested
- PCIe x16_3 (x4 electrical) - Mellanox Connectx-3 NIC
- PCIe x16_4 (x8 electrical, IOU1, enabled as 4x4 in BIOS) - tested
BIOS version 4805 BI ALL ME (h/t Deluxe, Lost_N_Bios, Meatwar)
will update/edit this if I can get anything more conclusive for each slot
Update – having borrowed an extra x8 card and populated it with two NVMe drives, I get some weird behavior:
Enabling 4x4x4x4 bifurcation combined with 3 fully-populated drives results in one drive from the x16 card being visible, with one drive visible in the x8 card (with 4x4)
But if I change the cards (so the x8 is in the x16 slot, and vice-versa), then a different drive for each card is visible – the other drive in the x8 card becomes visible, and another drive on the x16 becomes read.
No more than 1 drive per x16 slot is visible, unfortunately. I just can’t get it to work.