EVGA Z270 Classified – K (134-KS-E279)
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standards. All M.2 devices are designed to connect via a card-bus style
connector and be bolted into place and powered by the connector, rather than
by a dedicated data cable and power cable. This socket will support Key-M
devices of 110mm, 80mm, 60mm, and 42mm length.
Conflict
: The Key-M 110mm connector shares the 4 PCH lanes with the U.2
port. As a result, these devices are mutually exclusive and must be
enabled/disabled in the BIOS.
13. M.2 Socket 3 Key-M 80mm
M.2 is a SSD standard, which uses up to four PCI-E lanes and utilizes Gen3
speeds. Most popularly paired with NVMe SSDs, this standard offers
substantially faster transfer speeds and seek time than SATA interface
standards. All M.2 devices are designed to connect via a card-bus style
connector and be bolted into place and powered by the connector, rather than
by a dedicated data cable and power cable. This socket will support Key-M
devices of 80mm, 60mm, and 42mm length.
Conflict
: The Key-M 80mm shares PCH lanes with SATA ports 2 and 3 and
sometimes PCI-E slots 3 and 5. As a result, these devices can be mutually
exclusive and must be enabled/disabled in the BIOS. See Page 26 for a more
in-depth breakdown.
14. M.2 Socket 1 Key-E 32mm
M.2 Key-E is largely used for WiFi and Bluetooth cards. Key-E and Key-M
connectors are different, meaning that devices are not interchangeable between
sockets.
15. PCI-E Slot x16/x8
PCI-E x16/x8 slots are primarily for video cards. These full-length slots will
provide 8 or 16 lanes of bandwidth to a full-size card, and are backwards-
compatible with x8, x4, and x1-length cards.
Skylake and Kaby Lake-S Socket 1151 processors have 16 PCI-E lanes available
for routing.
The 16 PCI-E lanes are pulled from the CPU and shared with the x16 PCI-E
slot 4 (PE4). Lanes automatically switch from x16/x0 to x8/x8 when the
motherboard detects a card in slot PE4.
