That has 16 lanes , if you plan to use a PCIE slot for your M . 2 drive you will use 4 lanes , and 8 will be reserved for your GPU . Should be fine . Wrong wrong wrong . Sorry , but this is a big misconception and it needs to be nipped in the bud . I ' m gonna call in uJoIIyRanter so he doesn ' t get the wrong idea and continue to spread it . There are more PCIe lanes than just those given by the CPU . That ' s a damn good thing because just 16 isn ' t anywhere near enough for everything we need . This CPU in particular has 16 PCIe lanes which almost always either go to a single x 16 slot or can be shared among two x 16 slots for SLI . The chipset provides a lot more and are connected to the CPU through the DMI . Each chipset offers a different number of these lanes , but there are quite a few and they get split up and used for everything from the NIC to SATA to USB ports in addition to additional PCIe ports usually x 1 but they can go up to x 4 gen 3 . An M . 2 slot will be using these lanes , not the lanes from the CPU directly . OP , not all M . 2 slots are the same . M . 2 is just a physical connector . Similar to how not all USB ports or SATA ports are the same , not all M . 2 are the same . A PCIe x 2 M . 2 is going to be limited to half the bandwidth of an x 4 . You can also interface SATA or even USB over M . 2 .