@Lost_N_BIOS
@BlazingJ

I got parts 1 and 2 working only.
I use an Evo970Plus on an Asus Hyper M.2 Quad Card on an Asus P9X79E-WS board.
Applied an Nvme-Boot-Mod Bios from Lost_N_Bios or JackSted and did clean install from windows setup medium.
System boots from Nvme, even has secure boot enabled.

But I cannot get any of the bifurcation mods I received so far to work. Options are displayed in Bios Setup, but those are of no function.
Same works on a Z9PE-D8 WS board, which features bifurcation settings by default.

I haven't tried out any kind of creating a RAID set from SSDs on one of the quad cards, so I can't be helpful in that case either

@paranoid_android - you need bifurcation enabled BIOS, and then mess with the IOU bifurcation settings until you find which ones apply to which slots on your board. Sorry, I assumed you sorted that out already and had been using bifurcation by now
Also, as you see in post #74, sometimes you need to use certain slots on your hyper cards too. Ahh, so you have used it on Z98PE-D8, so you know what I mean about the settings/slots etc.
Sounds like whichever X79 BIOS your using may be broken X79 bifurcation BIOS then, they (hyper cards/bifurcation) work for everyone else in those threads up to 3 cards tested by some users (Four always fails).

@Lost_N_BIOS - I have two mod Bioses here, one made by you or JackSted and one from MIG174, from this thread (dated Feb 2020).
Neither could successful enable bifurcation on my P9X79E-WS.

I can't test every slot of the board, because system fails right away when I set bifurcation to root port 3 which provides PCIe slots 1 through 3 on board.
I have had all three 970 Evo SSDs I have tested on eihter M.2 card, the AsRock Quad card as well as the Asus Quad card.
I have to keep one SSD in M.2 slot #1, as it is the system drive.

When CSM is activated, the NMVE SSDs appear in the Setup screens Boot Section.
Whatever Setting I choose, none except the drive in M2. slot #1 is displayed.
Up to now, bifurcation mod is not working on my board.

Mig 174 does not mention that he made use of his bifurcation mod himself, only that he enabled the setup options.
Up to now, I haven't read of *any* enabled bifurcation on a P9X79E-WS Board.

I had something similar with my Z9-Board: As you might recall, I am trying to deactivate the onboard lan controllers.
I had a person from asus support on telephone and he made me some modded bios images with the disable option visible.
But he said right away, that it might not be functional. And it wasn't.
So it seems, that just because an option can be seen or is made visible in bios setup, does not mean that the function is active also...

Show me images of the PCI Subsystem settings, and ALL the bifurcation settings in IOH menu, then we can tell who's BIOS you are using. Please resize to 800px wide and zip them all up, thanks
You need to remove everything else, and allow yourself to properly test the BIOS and or all slots, so you can rule out any issues or restrictions caused by yourself trying to leave stuff in place. Then after you figure things out you can sort it all out.
Surely one root port does not cover three PCIE slots??

NVME must be clean/RAW for best chance of working and being seen at boot screen, otherwise initialize as GPT and then carry on.
Yes, I remember the Z9 board, still waiting on your feedback there Please test the BIOS I sent you so we can confirm. Then if that fails, I will make follow up with hard disabled and then you can test that.

@BlazingJ
Nope no hardware raid NVME support for X79 so you cant install windows on it :(
I'm using 2 250gb SATA SSD's in iRST RAID 0 for windows and apps. And 2 500GB NVME currently striped by windows for projects and games.
I haven't migrated yet but my plan is to put windows and apps on one NVME and the rest on the other NVME and retire the SATA drives.
Unless you just want to be able to copy huge files real quick over 40 GBit networks or from one RAID to the other RAID, best real world performance considering random IO would probably not be using any form of RAID, especially done by windows because of CPU overhead.
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@paranoid_android
If the schematic in the Anandtech Asus p9x79e-ws review is accurate only the 4th PCI slot would work in x4x4 since the rest is PLX multiplexed. Depending on the model of your adapter to top 2 or the bottom 2 NVME slots should be populated to correspond to the correct PCIE lanes.
If all else fails the least headache imho would be to forgo bifurcation sell that quad NVME adapter and get those single NVME adapters then stick em in separate PCIE slots.

@JackSted
The initial goal was to make use of Slot #4 as ×4×4.
The connectors on the the quad M.2 card(s) which would match are #1 and #2.
Those are visibliy wired to the first and second 4-lane section of the quad card's PCIe connector.

Last option for bifurcation use would be to get a twin M.2 card (i.e. that one from Supermicro) and see if that works.
Currently I'm using the sole M2 SSD mounted to a single M.2-to-PCIe ×4-adaptor card.
If all else fails, well, then I'd have to waste one of the remaining PLX'ed slots for a second M.2 SSD.
Would have been more comfortable to populate PCIe Slot #4 with two SSDs though, so I'd have some room left for expansion cards.

One option is still left then: use of a tiwn PCIe ×4 slot Riser Card.
There is a guy who desings several kinds of those and sells them on ebay (professionally manufactured).
On of those risers, plus some PCIe riser cables plus some sort of frame to fix two M.2 adaptors... that is something left to try.

The unused quad M.2 card might join the other one, in a PCIe ×16 Slot of the Z9 board.
I'd be able to use eight M.2 SSDs that way...


[OT: Do you have some sort of guide of how you got that E5-1680v2 OC'd and running stable? I'm planning to get one of those. /OT]

@paranoid_android
Dual NVME risers still require bifurcation support so that would not help you. A card like the HighPoint SSD7101A-1 should work since it has PLX on board.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ax620z-JKEk Seems to have the correct settings to OC to 4.4, You need a triple rad AiO, I cannot recommend going faster without custom water cooling. At that point I would actually recommend getting an AMD x570 (Aorus Pro supports 4x4x4x4 bifurcation) board with a ryzen 3800x for a 15-30% faster CPU on air cooling.

@JackSted, I had a similar solution with PLX on baord in use and it caused all Systems (2×X79, 1×C602) to freeze when trying to write to attached ssds.
Plus, it does cost way more than a riser card.
That's the main reason I want the bifurcation to work.
Sure dual risers require it to work as well as quad risers do, that's what my efforts are all about.
The C602 features bifurcation, the X79 is sort of the same silicon, so It'd have to work somehow?
Asus 2nd level tech support confirmed that bifurcation is technically possible for C602 as well X79 systems, and that they activate it on demand in custom bioses for corporate business clients.
Or, maybe: Does bifurcation work when using Xeons only, instead of i7 CPUs?

About the CPU: I just want to add the 1680v2 to one of my X79 systems to get four more threads (and 3rd lvl cache) while keeping the clock speed.
So it would be enough for me if the 1680v2 ran at, say, 4.2GHz allcore turbo.
It's about maxing out what is currently present, and those are two X79 and one C602 platforms.

If I wanted to settle to a completely different system, I'd wait a while and go for something like the TRx4 platform later...

@Lost_N_BIOS

So i dug a bit deeper and found something interesting. It's is the Asrock Z170 Extreme7+ and how you natively make a raid with NVME in the bios.
Since the Asrock x79 Extreme9 also has IRS (3.0 don't know wich version the Z170 uses) and a marvell raid controller(build in), i was wondering if you can look around in the bios if there is such a hidden option as the Z170, see pictures of the Z170.

I couldn't check what options there are, because i am building a watercooling loop. Hopefully tomorrow if i all the missing stuff gets delivered it can boot up again and then make soms SS of the same menu's.

@BlazingJ - Those modern boards use a MUCH newer RST modules in the BIOS, and they are made to be able to do this and work with NVME etc, this is not possible on X79
Marvell ports/controller would not be used for anything we're discussing here

@Lost_N_BIOS

Is it possible to update the RST Module in the Bios, even if the mobo lacks the hardware to create the PCIE-NVME Raid.

Reading the post before with JEN, the ME FW update/mod bricked her bios. Is the current modded bios (that works for me)up to date? Like the marvell controllers, RST, microupdate and the other stuff. I don't know what kind of modules the bios consist of that can be updatet.

Hi @Lost_N_BIOS

Hope it's not too much trouble, but do you have that NVME enabled bios for this board available? The links seem dead :(

I'm currently running the 4.00 bios so I presume Jens final file would be the correct one? I don't specifically need the Bifurcation feature.

Lost_N_BIOS is been away since the beginning of the year, do the mod yourself, address it to a specific user still active in this thread, that can share it or post a request.

@MeatWar

Ah, I did not know - the forum does not allow me to see how long ago people posted.

@BlazingJ do you have the modded BIOS for this card still?

Hi @Lost_N_BIOS,
Could I get a copy of the nvme modded bios if you still have it? Asrock extreme 9 x79
Wanting to get m.2 boot on my board
Thanks in advance