Hi, I want to build an 8th+ gen Intel based system that boots Linux Mint from the fastest M.2 NVME drive I can get (for the least money possible). I've heard conflicting stories about the M.2 interface and booting with NVME sticks as 'insecure boot' bios.


I want:


Motherboard that will allow booting Linux from a PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 NVME 500GB drive

Looking to accommodate:

Intel i5 8th gen CPU, 8400 6-core Coffee
16GB DDR RAM
M.2 NVME Samsung MZ-V7E500BW 970 EVO 500
Nvidia 1050ti


I am not a gamer, I just want quick I/O and general snappiness.


All recommendations are welcome!

I'd go with a workstation mb personally as I am not a gamer either. What price range for the mobo?

Anything up to £120, I don't need anything too fancy. Linux will live on the fastest available slot, presumably PCI-E 3, x4. I've used Gigabyte in the past but I've seen a few grumbly review from Linux users citing boot issues.

Regarding boot times...

I used to have Windows 10 installed on a Samsung SM961 that has 3150MB/s reads. Windows loaded in a couple of seconds. POST was far slower... maybe 5s. At that time I tried Mint 19.1 and Ubuntu 18.10 on a Samsung 850 EVO SSD. OS loading times were slower... approx 5-6s.

I now have Ubuntu 18.10 installed on the SM961 and it doesn't load any quicker than it did on the 850 EVO.

I found the most influential factor to my boot times was the number of drives I had plugged in. I started off with the NVME, SSD and two HDD in RAID 1. Less drives meant quicker boot times.

I'd still buy an NVME drive (programs such as Libre Office, Blender etc load almost instantly , <1s) but in my experience Linux loading times don't benefit as much as they did with Windows.

FWIW, I use an MSI Z170a-Pro, i3-6100, 8GB 3ghz RAM and an R9 380 GPU. I went with the MSI m/b because it was the cheapest board that supports M.2 and 3.2ghz RAM. It cost about £100 and I don't regret it one bit.

I've gotten used to weirdly long boot times in Linux, my recent distro of choice, Mint 19.1 being the slowest yet. I want super snappy general file shuffling and program loading. I do have a few disks but hope to reduce this to 2 - NVME for the OS and home directories, SATA SSD for more static, archive stuff, downloads and whatnot. I just want to be sure I have a mobo that is 100% compatible with booting linux via M.2/NVME.

I think as long as you have the M.2 slot then you should be OK to boot from the PCI bus. From what I've gathered over the couple of years I've had an NVME drive it's motherboards without the slot that can't boot... ie people who have bought a PCIe M.2 adapter are left disappointed. There was never a need to boot from that bus in the past.

I had a look at overclockers.co.uk earlier. I can't recommend any motherboard because I haven't read up on them but I noticed the new version of mine MSI Z370a-Pro is £100 and seems to have the spec you will be looking for.

http://www.gigabyte.us/Motherboard/GA-B250M-D3H-rev-10 works great for me with NVME and a pair of rotating rust for RAID. The NVME is booted UEFI normally, the MBR RAID when needed from the F12 menu.