Is my Samsung 980 PRO NVMe M.2 running in PCIe 3 or PCIe 4 mode?

I am an owner of the MSI MEG Z490 ACE motherboard. https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/MEG-Z490-ACE/Overview

When I bought the board about 15 months ago, I nstalled the Intel I5-10600k 4.1GHz processor, together with the Samsung 970 PRO 512GB NVMe M.2 (PCIe Gen 3.0).

Since my motherboard did fully support the update to the “PCIe 4.0”, about two weeks ago, I “upgraded” my CPU to the Core i7-11700K Rocket Lake 3.6GHz Eight-Core LGA 1200 and also to the 980 PRO PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD 2TB.

I am aware and did quite bit of reading regarding that there is not such a dramatical change for the Z490 chipset, versus the Z590 but I still decided to do it.

So here is my question: How do I know that my system is actually running in PCIe 4.0 now?

When I pull up Samsung Magician 7, it seems to report that my 980 Pro is running in PCIe 3.0 mode. But when I pull-up CPU-Z, it’s telling me that I have a PCIe 4.0 computer.

I am also showing here my CrystalDiskMark8 performance.

The rest of my system is nVidia Super 2070 card, running Windows 10 x64.

Any comments or advise is appreciated.

 

I am not familiar with MSI boards, but I did read over the specifications of that motherboard. The nvme is in the M2_1 slot? That would be the only slot that would support PCIE 4. Maybe you need to do something in the Bios? Looking at your Crystal score, it is only running at pcie 3 speeds. I have a 980 pro, and it runs a lot faster then that on a z590 board, but ran your score on my Z490. I had tried running two different 11 gen cpu (11700k, and 11900k) on two Asrock Z490 boards that were the same model, and even though they were to support 11 gen, they did not play nice with the 11 gen cpu. I put back in the 10 gen cpu (10700k) everything was fine. Maybe someone with MSI experience will chime in.

 

Wow, I think you just solved the problem, as I DO NOT have the Pro 980 in the M2_1 slot. It's actually in the M2_2 slot. I guess I will give it a try this weekend.

THANK YOU!

 

CPU-Z only reads the max capabilities not current capabilities.

 

Well, I was wrong! My Samsung 980 Pro WAS/IS actually in the M2_1 slot. See the photo. And my nVidia Super 2070 is in the PCI_E1 slot.

This must be then some setting in the BIOS that I am missing. I am running the latest firmware version 7C71v1B, dated 2021-10-18.

 

Found the Solution - I needed to change the mode from chipset support mode to CPU support mode in the BIOS for the M.2 setting under Advanced section.