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I wanted to ask this on the UK support forum of Gigabyte. The registration process went fine, but, a week later, I still haven't received the acceptance email from a moderator. Is the UK support forum dead too?
Anyway... I purchased a Gigabyte X299 UD4 Pro in combination with a Core i7-7820X (28 lanes) quite some time ago with the intend to upgrade the CPU later. The board supports 48-lane Cascade Lake-X CPUs according to the CPU support list, but there's no mention of it in the manual: it only explains the possible PCIe and SATA configurations with 16, 28 and 44-lane CPUs. This could either mean that the manual hasn't been updated, or that the motherboard doesn't utilize the 4 extra lanes over a 44-lane CPU.
A 44-lane CPU already gives full speed access to all PCIe slots, so there's nothing to improve there. But there are still limitations on the SATA level: when the first M.2 slot is populated with an M.2 drive (SATA or PCIe), four of the SATA ports are disabled. It would be cool if those could be re-enabled with a 48-lane CPU.
So, my question is: does the Gigabyte X299 UD4 Pro use the extra four lanes on a 48-lane CPU compared to a 44-lane CPU?
The plan is to upgrade to either an i7-9800X (44 lanes) or an i9-10900X (48 lanes), but I don't want to waste money on the more expensive 10900X if the motherboard won't do anything with the extra lanes.
Anyway... I purchased a Gigabyte X299 UD4 Pro in combination with a Core i7-7820X (28 lanes) quite some time ago with the intend to upgrade the CPU later. The board supports 48-lane Cascade Lake-X CPUs according to the CPU support list, but there's no mention of it in the manual: it only explains the possible PCIe and SATA configurations with 16, 28 and 44-lane CPUs. This could either mean that the manual hasn't been updated, or that the motherboard doesn't utilize the 4 extra lanes over a 44-lane CPU.
A 44-lane CPU already gives full speed access to all PCIe slots, so there's nothing to improve there. But there are still limitations on the SATA level: when the first M.2 slot is populated with an M.2 drive (SATA or PCIe), four of the SATA ports are disabled. It would be cool if those could be re-enabled with a 48-lane CPU.
So, my question is: does the Gigabyte X299 UD4 Pro use the extra four lanes on a 48-lane CPU compared to a 44-lane CPU?
The plan is to upgrade to either an i7-9800X (44 lanes) or an i9-10900X (48 lanes), but I don't want to waste money on the more expensive 10900X if the motherboard won't do anything with the extra lanes.