PCIe NVMe M.2 under GPU?

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night_2004

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I am looking to upgrade my six-year old rig and replace my i7-4770K with either an i9-10900K or i7-10700K. I just upgraded to a triple slot eVGA RTX 2080 Super.

Currently I am looking at three boards as they all have 2.5G+ Ethernet, dual Ethernet, the ability to run NVMe drives in RAID1 or RAID5, and can support 1 or 2 PCIe x1 cards without using the second x16 slot (do not want to share bandwidth with the GPU). I am currently using one (may expand to two eventually) PCIe x1 ATSC tuner card that will either move to the new rig or move to a Linux media server if I can get it running on that machine.
  • ASUS ROG Maximus XII Formula
    • Two M.2 slots away from GPU, third on the back of the motherboard.
    • Can only hold one PCIe x1 card at the cost of running one M.2 slot at x2 instead of x4.
  • ASUS Maximus XII Hero
    • Two M.2 slots under GPU, one M.2 away from GPU.
    • Can hold two additional PCIe x1 cards at no penalty, can hold a third at the cost of running one M.2 slot at x2 instead of x4.
  • Gigabyte Z490 Vision D
    • Two M.2 slots under GPU, one M.2 away from GPU.
    • Can hold one additional PCIe x1 card at no penalty.
    • Running two PCIe x1 cards limits the only M.2 away from the GPU to x2 instead of x4.
I still need to try moving my ATSC card to figure out how much I'll care about shared bandwidth between M.2 slots and PCIe slots. But the other issue I see is potential thermal issues with M.2's under the GPU. Why do so many designs assume that it is okay to place an M.2 card under a GPU? Do I need to be worried about thermals or the longevity of an M.2 NVMe if placed near the GPU?
 
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I would not worry about it too much, i'm using the Maximus XI hero and my 960 evo runs at max 65°, don't forget nand prefers some heath to work optimaly, the controller less so. Also the M2 drives are under a heatsink usually.
 
OK, make sure I get a board with heatsinks on the M.2 drives. Noted. I also managed to move my ATSC tuner to my Linux machine last night, so now I do not need to worry about the number of available PCIe slots. That may really open up the number of board to look at.

It is down to networking capabilities and other features making a difference when picking a board out.
 
Thanks for the inputs! With that info that's one less constraint to worry about went selecting a motherboard. Since the number of PCIe slots and the location of M.2's isn't a big concern, time to start over on looking for a motherboard. Lots of options to look at again.
 
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