Fortunately (?) my PSU let the smoke out about three years after I bought the initial one for that build which had IIRC a pair of 7950GTs in it from my previous machine, in SLI. So I had the opportunity to throw a modern-ish Corsair 850w power supply in it which has all the modular plugs I need. That box has had a succession of random graphics cards in it ranging from that old pair of 7950GTs, then a GTX680, then finally my current GTX1080Ti. Honestly, the 1080 is still plenty enough for most games in 1080p (possibly serendipitously) as long as you don’t feel the pathological need for raytracing or frame generation.
You can sidestep the NVMe issue as long as you don’t care about 100% speed by slapping a PCIe to NVMe adapter board in one of your handy unused x16 slots now that you’re no longer using SLI (if that reminds you of anyone you know). I’m not certain booting off of that is viable and I haven’t bothered to try to figure it out, so the boot drive in that machine is a SATA SSD currently.
On the bright side, that board has ten SATA ports so turning into a drive farm is a trivial prospect if you’re into that kind of thing.
I can’t say how your firmware will recognize a PCI-e to NVME, but as long as your aren’t chasing boot time records a SATA SSD should be more than sufficient for boot. You could just use the NVME for speed.
Another option would be to set up 6 SATA SSD drives in there with ZFS2. The striping and read-write speeds should significantly fill the SATA buffer of 6gbps. Due to the striping, you might actually avoid filing the read buffer and be about to sustain a longer high write speed.
The drive farm is also super viable. I have a 6-port board and a SAS card installed giving me 10 or 14 ports, I can’t recall. I have a similar strategy as I described, but I’m only using it for a NAS. I looked into getting a 12-port board, but used it was still $350. It makes more sense for me to buy another SAS card instead.
Fortunately (?) my PSU let the smoke out about three years after I bought the initial one for that build which had IIRC a pair of 7950GTs in it from my previous machine, in SLI. So I had the opportunity to throw a modern-ish Corsair 850w power supply in it which has all the modular plugs I need. That box has had a succession of random graphics cards in it ranging from that old pair of 7950GTs, then a GTX680, then finally my current GTX1080Ti. Honestly, the 1080 is still plenty enough for most games in 1080p (possibly serendipitously) as long as you don’t feel the pathological need for raytracing or frame generation.
You can sidestep the NVMe issue as long as you don’t care about 100% speed by slapping a PCIe to NVMe adapter board in one of your handy unused x16 slots now that you’re no longer using SLI (if that reminds you of anyone you know). I’m not certain booting off of that is viable and I haven’t bothered to try to figure it out, so the boot drive in that machine is a SATA SSD currently.
On the bright side, that board has ten SATA ports so turning into a drive farm is a trivial prospect if you’re into that kind of thing.
I can’t say how your firmware will recognize a PCI-e to NVME, but as long as your aren’t chasing boot time records a SATA SSD should be more than sufficient for boot. You could just use the NVME for speed.
Another option would be to set up 6 SATA SSD drives in there with ZFS2. The striping and read-write speeds should significantly fill the SATA buffer of 6gbps. Due to the striping, you might actually avoid filing the read buffer and be about to sustain a longer high write speed.
The drive farm is also super viable. I have a 6-port board and a SAS card installed giving me 10 or 14 ports, I can’t recall. I have a similar strategy as I described, but I’m only using it for a NAS. I looked into getting a 12-port board, but used it was still $350. It makes more sense for me to buy another SAS card instead.