I've started down the road on this SSD upgrade project: https://www.overclock.net/forum/355-ssd/1718404-nvme-pcie-x4-drive-z87-running-win7.html

I'm going into this with my eyes wide open:  trading a really tiny bit of graphics performance for blistering fast SSD performance (worth it!).

The drive is taking seeming forever to arrive.  I got the Win7 hotfixes installed and a modded bios ready to flash my mobo.  I won't flash until I see that Win7 works with the drive in my mobo; the flash is only needed to make the drive bootable.  I'll post an update when it all comes together.

Edited January 24, 20197 yr by TheFamilyMan

I didnt have any problems with the Z97 booting to an M.2 drive, but all I did was image the old SSD to the new SSD. Despite the specs being nearly identical (I think 100mb/s difference), I saw a good little boost in windows loading. So clearly SATA was a slight bottleneck vs. M2 drives.

The PCI-e X4 drive is faster yet, enjoy, they really scream!

Edited January 25, 20197 yr by turboken

Thanks for the feedback.  I finally got that drive installed.  It was literally plug'n'play to get it to work in my mobo once the Win7 NVMe hotfixes were installed.  CrystalDiskMark claims it's seeing the drive's spec performance in my rig, which is nearly 6x the speed of my fastest sata3 SSD: reads at 3200MB/sec (vs. sata3@512).  Turns out the process to make it bootable with Win7 is considerably more than I initially surmised (may require a new Win7 install to get that smooookin' fast boot time), but ultimately it is (seemingly) doable.  Have yet to see any RL noticeable effects of running my 1070 gtx at PCIe x8, driving a 2k monitor.

Edited February 1, 20197 yr by TheFamilyMan

On 2/1/2019 at 3:47 PM, TheFamilyMan said:

  Have yet to see any RL noticeable effects of running my 1070 gtx at PCIe x8, driving a 2k monitor.

Same here. I ran all benchmarks. Absolutely no difference with my RTX2080.