Question about NVMe SSD Adapter Cards  

My computer is a Dell XPS 8700, and the only onboard SSD port is for an mSATA sized SSD; I got a standard 2.5" sized SSD (samsung 860 evo) as my OS drive, and it has been good for my system when I got it and beyond. But I found a somewhat good deal for a 1 TB NVMe SSD (Samsung 970 Evo Plus), and I want to ask a question I hope can be answered

If I get an adapter card for my computer like this, either from ebay or amazon or whatever other retailer its bought from, and use an NVMe SSD on it, will there be any performance drop at all compared to using it on a motherboard that has an NVMe capable slot on it?

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Here's what PCIe slots I got, slot 27 is occupied by my video card (AMD RX 570) which also blocks slot 26, and slot 24 is occupied by my sound card (Sound Blaster Recon 3d PCIe). If needed, I can remove the sound card and switch to the onboard sound via the motherboard's sound port and free up slot 24

But the big question is this: adapter card or not, will my XPS 8700's motherboard be able to run an NVMe SSD, or am I better off getting a new computer to truly take advantage of the speeds an NVMe SSD offers?

Those slots are all x1, so they wont get the performance of an x4 that they might otherwise have off the motherboard.

so stick with 2.5" laptop sized SSDs until a new computer then....eh, I can buy the NVMe SSD and keep it later on until I get my dad to fund half for computer parts. im done getting pre-config'd ones from dell

The XPS 8700 motherboard uses a Z87 chipset. I believe that is not capable of booting from an NVME drive. That would pretty much negate any advantage from sticking in an NVME SSD.

I suggest not buying an NVME M.2 drive until you're ready to use it. They are usually going down in price, going up in capacity, or both.

I would have suggested swapping in a new microATX motherboard, but Dell apparently makes their systems just proprietary enough to make that awkward. (Supposedly, the front panel header isn't standard.) You'd also need a new CPU, plus DDR4 RAM. You might as well blow the whole thing away. (You could keep the graphics card.)

If all goes well and my father is willing to front half the cash for my planned setup ill do through pcpartpicker, then the motherboard ill be choosing will be using 2 nvme SSDs (one for the OS and what programs that can't be installed on other hard drives, the other for games/documents/pictures/etc...); ill be keeping the HDD in my system along with the other one for macrium reflect backups just in-case

it'll be the first time I built a computer, that'll be fun, probably

BrokenDaily said:

If all goes well and my father is willing to front half the cash for my planned setup ill do through pcpartpicker, then the motherboard ill be choosing will be using 2 nvme SSDs (one for the OS and what programs that can't be installed on other hard drives, the other for games/documents/pictures/etc...); ill be keeping the HDD in my system along with the other one for macrium reflect backups just in-case

it'll be the first time I built a computer, that'll be fun, probably

I'm not sure that it makes sense to use two NVME M.2 drives. Some motherboard/CPU combinations may not fully support two, because of limited PCI-E lane resources. I suggest a single, largish one (500GB or 1TB). They're not overly expensive.

If you want bleeding edge, PCI-E 4.0 M.2 drives are now available. You'd need a third generation AMD Ryzen CPU and an X570 motherboard to run them at PCI-E 4.0 speeds, though. (Mainly useful for benchmarks. Some bench around 5000MB/s sequential reads.) The drives are more expensive than the plain old PCI-E 3.0 ones. It may make more sense to get one for the faster 3.0 drives, that use TLC rather than QLC.

I have a M.2 MVMe and a 2.5" SSD.
Although a M.2 MVMe is much faster than a 2.5" SSD, you will only see the difference on the benchmark test.