A Server For Blender

[Ricardo2020]

After installing the secondary riser and 4-way M.2 card, it was time to go into the BIOS to see if it would bifurcate. Pressing CTL+A at the System Settings screen, we arrived at the hidden developer setting which controls the bifurcation function. Sadly, this setting only affects the primary riser 16X slot, and it only offers to do two 8X divisions on the 16X slot.

The BIOS is dated 2015, and it has been stated at leading tech forums that upgrading to the 2020 release might offer bifurcation and dual bifurcation, but nobody has said the secondary riser will get these settings. Thus, it is still a mystery as to whether or not I can get the 4-way M.2 card to work.

If support for bifurcation is not available on the secondary slot, I will need to scale back the NVMe boot sector solution to use one drive on a different card, probably a 4X single drive card. Some folks have reported success with that setup, while others have stated that it cannot be done without a BIOS update.

We shall see once the parts are made available and the BIOS flash file is obtained and installed.