Upgrade Veriton X4610G to Windows 10 and NVMe PCIe SSD

My Acer Veriton X4610G desktop was shipped with Windows 7 on the internal HDD. Its motherboard (with Intel Q65 chip-set) has an unused PCIe x16 (PCIe V2.0) expansion slot. Now that Win 7 support will end in 2020, I'd like to do two things:

Upgrade to Windows 10
Boot it from an M.2 NVMe PCIe SSD

I'd like to keep the existing HDD (and leave it untouched until I get Win 10 running). In order to add an M.2 NVMe SSD, I'd like to install an NVMe PCIe x16 gen 2 adapter card that offers the necessary M.2 slot.

These two upgrades will make my desktop ready for the future. It has plenty of horse power that's not the problem, but I have the following worries:

Will Windows 10 run properly on the Veriton X4610G (it is not listed here)?
Will an NVMe PCIe x16 gen 2 adapter card work in the PCIe x16 (PCIe V2.0) slot?
Can the Veriton X4610G boot from the M.2 NVMe SSD on the adapter card (according to this article any gen6 chip-set, such as the Q65 should be able to)?

Did anybody go before me and has experience in these questions or maybe succeed in the these goals?

Accepted answers

The Veriton X4610G will definitely run Windows 10. I succeeded in upgrading to Windows 10 and even managed to upgrade my Windows 7 license to a Windows 10 license for free.

I also managed to install an M.2 NVMe SSD via an PCIe adapter card.

Furthermore I successfully created a dual boot system between Windows 10 and XUbuntu linux 20.04 LTS.

The system has become nice and quick now.

Windows 10 cold start time: 7 seconds, shutdown time: 9 seconds
XUbuntu 20.04 LTS cold start time: 5 seconds, shutdown time: 3 seconds

Here are some IO performance measurements of the NVMe SSD boot drive:

Here are the answers to my questions in the opening post:

Windows 10 will run properly on the Veriton X4610G (whilst it is not listed here).
An NVMe PCIe x16 gen 3 adapter card will work in the PCIe x16 (PCIe V2.0) slot.
The Veriton X4610G can boot from an M.2 NVMe SSD on the adapter card (any gen6 chip-set, such as the Q65 is able to), but needs a BIOS update to do so.

Here are crucial pointers for successful upgrade to Windows 10:

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/6029997/uploads/editor/0q/0xdcphtn1qwe.png

Remove the PCIe WiFi card from the system before you attempt an in-place-upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10. You can place it back after the upgrade is complete. Otherwise your upgrade will fail with error code: 0xC1900101-0x4000D and your upgrade will be rolled back. Your Windows 7 license will be upgrade to a free Windows 10 digital license.

I used this NVMe M.2 to PCIe x4 adapter card. Buy a cheap / low spec'ed NVMe drive that supports 4 PCIe lanes. Your PCIe v2 bus speed will most likely be the limiting factor, but it will still be much faster than all SATA SSD drives.

I formatted the NVMe SSD with as GPT and did a clean UEFI install of Windows 10. Start the Windows 10 upgrade drive via UEFI (Use F12 to enter the boot selector at startup). The digital license will kick in automatically if you did the in-place-upgrade first.

I upgraded my BIOS firmware to one with NVMe drivers on board in order to boot from the NVMe drive.

Install XUbuntu 20.04 after you installed Windows 10 and let Grub 2 be your boot manager.

Enjoy your Veriton X4610G for many years to come now that More's law has broken down and processor speed has hit its limit.

The Veriton X4610G will definitely run Windows 10. I succeeded in upgrading to Windows 10 and even managed to upgrade my Windows 7 license to a Windows 10 license for free.

I also managed to install an M.2 NVMe SSD via a PCIe adapter card.

Furthermore I successfully created a dual boot system between Windows 10 and XUbuntu linux 20.04 LTS.

The system has become nice and quick now:

Windows 10 cold start time: 7 seconds, shutdown time: 9 seconds

XUbuntu 20.04 LTS cold start time: 5 seconds, shutdown time: 3 seconds

Here are the IO performance measurements of the NVMe SSD boot drive:

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/6029997/uploads/editor/e8/ggr9blmpzek3.png

The answers to my questions in the opening post:

Windows 10 will run properly on the Veriton X4610G.
An NVMe PCIe x16 gen 3 adapter card will work in the PCIe x16 (PCIe V2.0) slot.
The Veriton X4610G can boot from an M.2 NVMe SSD on the adapter card (any gen6 chip-set, such as the Q65 is able to). I needs a BIOS update to do so.

Here come crucial pointers for successful upgrade to Windows 10:

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/6029997/uploads/editor/at/9q0fn6uvt7kr.png

Remove the PCIe WiFi card from the system before you attempt an in-place-upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10. You can place it back after the upgrade is complete. Otherwise your upgrade will fail with error code: 0xC1900101-0x4000D and your upgrade will be rolled back. Your Windows 7 license will be upgraded to a Windows 10 digital license for free.

I used this NVMe M.2 to PCIe x4 adapter card. Buy a cheap / low spec'ed NVMe drive that supports 4 PCIe lanes. Your PCIe v2 bus speed will most likely be the limiting factor, but it will still be much faster than the fastest SATA SSD drives. Just be sure the NVMe SSD specs outperform the performance measurements I posted above to obtain maximum performance.

I formatted the NVMe SSD with GPT and did a clean UEFI install of Windows 10. (Start the Windows 10 upgrade drive in UEFI mode. Use F12 to enter the boot selector at startup to select the UEFI boot device.) The digital license will kick in automatically if you did the in-place-upgrade beforehand.

I upgraded my BIOS firmware with NVMe drivers on board, in order to boot from the NVMe drive in a Windows pre-boot environment.

Install XUbuntu 20.04 after you installed Windows 10 and let Grub 2 be your boot manager.

Enjoy your Veriton X4610G for many years to come now that processor speed is leveling off and Moore's law is breaking down.

All comments

Commodore_1995#

The problem is that nvme speed will be limited to pci2.0 port speed. You can purchase a 2.5 "ssd together with a 3.5" caddy to hdd adapter and plug it directly into the sata 3.0 port.

egydiocoelho said:

The problem is that nvme speed will be limited to pci2.0 port speed.

Yes please! Lets analyze that. A 4 lanes NVMe SSD uses 4 paths on a PCIe v2.0 interface. One path has a throughput of 500 MB/s, so 4 paths give up to 2 GB/s. A SATA 3 SSD's theoretical max speed is only 600 MB/s. So SATA 3 speed pales in comparison to NVMe x4 via the PCIe v2.0 interface by a factor of 3.3. (In a one way scenario NVMe will still outperform SATA 3 by a factor of 1.6 and SATA 2 by a factor of 3.3.)

egydiocoelho said:

You can purchase a 2.5 "ssd together with a 3.5" caddy to hdd adapter and plug it directly into the sata 3.0 port.

You are mistaken. I'll explain why. First of all, there is no physical space in the system for another SATA SSD. Neither is there a power lead available from the PSU. Furthermore there is no free SATA 3 port either (only a SATA 2 port is free, which only delivers up to 300MB/s of throughput). Remember that I am not abandoning the built in SATA HDD (nor DVD/CD RW).

The most elegant solution for expending the system with an SSD is to make use of the free PCIe x 16 slot, which will take care of physical placement, powering, cooling and the best throughput of the NVMe SSD via an M.2 PCIe adapter card.

Upgrading to an NVMe SSD over PCIe seems the best way to go for the Acer Veriton X4610G, don't you think so?

The Acer support page shows that there have been no BIOS updates since:

Date: 2012/11/12

BIOS Version: P01.B3

There will be no NVMe SSD support in the BIOS firmware. This is just an outdated (BIOS) software problem, because the Q65 chip-set does support NVMe.

How can we request Acer to add an NVMe SSD driver to the BIOS and release a BIOS update?

Acer employs the concept of circular economies and strives to reduce the impact of our products on the environment, so surely the environment will benefit when Acer can provide a BIOS update that keeps a perfectly good and powerful PC viable for the future.

Commodore_1995#

It will probably work using the pcie 2.0 port. The problem as I told you earlier is at pcie port speed!

egydiocoelho said:

It will probably work using the pcie 2.0 port. The problem as I told you earlier is at pcie port speed!

You are mistaken. I'll explain why. First of all, there is no physical space in the system for another SATA SSD. Neither is there a power lead available from the PSU. Furthermore there is no free SATA 3 port either (only a SATA 2 port is free, which only delivers up to 300MB/s of throughput). Remember that I am not abandoning the built in SATA HDD (nor DVD/CD RW).

The most elegant solution for expending the system with an SSD is to make use of the free PCIe x 16 slot, which will take care of physical placement, powering, cooling and the best throughput of the NVMe SSD via an M.2 PCIe adapter card. It is much faster than SATA 2.

Please read the topic before you answer.

How can we request Acer to add an NVMe SSD driver to the BIOS and release a BIOS update?

The Acer support page shows that there have been no BIOS updates since:

Date: 2012/11/12

BIOS Version: P01.B3

There will be no NVMe SSD support in the BIOS firmware. This is just an outdated (BIOS) software problem, because the Q65 chip-set does support NVMe.

Acer employs the concept of circular economies and strives to reduce the impact of our products on the environment, so surely the environment will benefit when Acer can provide a BIOS update that keeps a perfectly good and powerful PC viable for the future.

How can we request Acer to add an NVMe SSD driver to the BIOS and release a BIOS update?

You have an x1 port used by the WiFi card and an x16 port used by the GPU. I don't see a spare there unless you are removing the WiFi. The main issue with using a PCIe slot for an NVMe drive is that the cards aren't bootable without a special BIOS on the card itself. Best is likely to replace the existing HDD with a similar sized SSD using a 2.5->3.5 adapter and dropping the old HDD into a USB case for use as a backup.

@Billsey, thanks four your reply. My X4610G didn't come with a discrete graphics card, it runs integrated graphics from the CPU, which if fine with me. So as I mentioned in the opening post, I have a free PCIe x16 slot (I saw it being open in the within case, so no worries there). I want to retain my 1TB HDD with its Win 7 installation and backup partition in tact and available.

Even if I want to add a SATA SSD, then I would still want it to be in the PCIe slot for power and cooling. (Have a look at this dual M.2 NVMe over PCIe and M.2 SSD over SATA3 card.)

What do you mean with "the cards aren't bootable without a special BIOS on the card itself"?

Are there any NVMe cards available, that allow one to boot Win 10 from it without an Acer BIOS update and deliver NVMe speed (not SATA speed)?

BTW Why would't Acer update the BIOS with an NVMe driver? Only the BIOS software seems to be holding the X4610G back.

I looked fairly extensively for bootable cards like that a couple of years ago and didn't have any luck except for a couple of really expensive RAID cards. The development effort to do one with a bootable ROM onboard is so much higher than for just a drive interface no one can find a niche market that pays well enough. What you *might* be able to do is get a decent M.2 NVMe card for that slot and leave the special UEFI partition on the HDD, editing the UEFI settings such that the rest of the boot happens from the SSD. It won't be quite the performance boost that a full NVMe boot will get you, but the slower portion is only going to be while UEFI starts up.

@billsey "leave the special UEFI partition on the HDD, editing the UEFI settings such that the rest of the boot happens from the SSD" That sounds very interesting. Please tell me more if you can?

Would a major Windows 10 update not invalidate such a setup as it allegedly modifies UEFI partitions?

There is another compelling reason for Acer to bring out a BIOS update for the X4610G, which is a 2012 customized AMI BIOS. It is its susceptibility to the LoJax rootkit, which installs itself in the UEFI BIOS and even survives OS re-installs.

The CERT Coordination Center advises in VU#766164

American Megatrends Incorporated (AMI) Status: Affected; End users should contact their board manufacturer for information on when a specific updated BIOS will be available.

@Marty11 I'm sorry I'm so slow in responding. The time I configured a machine to do UEFI from the HDD and still have the C: partition on the SSD I had an existing install on the HDD and the SSD blank. I booted the install flash drive and chose install on the SSD. I was actually a bit surprised when it left the three system partitions alone (100MB UEFI, 450MB Recovery, 1+GB Recovery) and created a C: partition that was the full size of the SSD. I figured to leave well enough alone and just wiped the old C: from the HDD and reformatted it as a data disk. The machine has run flawlessly and that was three years ago.

The Veriton X4610G will definitely run Windows 10. I succeeded in upgrading to Windows 10 and even managed to upgrade my Windows 7 license to a Windows 10 license for free.

I also managed to install an M.2 NVMe SSD via an PCIe adapter card.

Furthermore I successfully created a dual boot system between Windows 10 and XUbuntu linux 20.04 LTS.

The system has become nice and quick now.

Windows 10 cold start time: 7 seconds, shutdown time: 9 seconds
XUbuntu 20.04 LTS cold start time: 5 seconds, shutdown time: 3 seconds

Here are some IO performance measurements of the NVMe SSD boot drive:

Here are the answers to my questions in the opening post:

Windows 10 will run properly on the Veriton X4610G (whilst it is not listed here).
An NVMe PCIe x16 gen 3 adapter card will work in the PCIe x16 (PCIe V2.0) slot.
The Veriton X4610G can boot from an M.2 NVMe SSD on the adapter card (any gen6 chip-set, such as the Q65 is able to), but needs a BIOS update to do so.

Here are crucial pointers for successful upgrade to Windows 10:

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/6029997/uploads/editor/0q/0xdcphtn1qwe.png

Remove the PCIe WiFi card from the system before you attempt an in-place-upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10. You can place it back after the upgrade is complete. Otherwise your upgrade will fail with error code: 0xC1900101-0x4000D and your upgrade will be rolled back. Your Windows 7 license will be upgrade to a free Windows 10 digital license.

I used this NVMe M.2 to PCIe x4 adapter card. Buy a cheap / low spec'ed NVMe drive that supports 4 PCIe lanes. Your PCIe v2 bus speed will most likely be the limiting factor, but it will still be much faster than all SATA SSD drives.

I formatted the NVMe SSD with as GPT and did a clean UEFI install of Windows 10. Start the Windows 10 upgrade drive via UEFI (Use F12 to enter the boot selector at startup). The digital license will kick in automatically if you did the in-place-upgrade first.

I upgraded my BIOS firmware to one with NVMe drivers on board in order to boot from the NVMe drive.

Install XUbuntu 20.04 after you installed Windows 10 and let Grub 2 be your boot manager.

Enjoy your Veriton X4610G for many years to come now that More's law has broken down and processor speed has hit its limit.

Thanks billsey, but I couldn't get your kind of setup working for me. The window's pre boot environment can't read from the NVMe SSD without a NVMe driver, which isn't available in the pre-boot environment.

I did find another solution.

The Veriton X4610G will definitely run Windows 10. I succeeded in upgrading to Windows 10 and even managed to upgrade my Windows 7 license to a Windows 10 license for free.

I also managed to install an M.2 NVMe SSD via a PCIe adapter card.

Furthermore I successfully created a dual boot system between Windows 10 and XUbuntu linux 20.04 LTS.

The system has become nice and quick now:

Windows 10 cold start time: 7 seconds, shutdown time: 9 seconds

XUbuntu 20.04 LTS cold start time: 5 seconds, shutdown time: 3 seconds

Here are the IO performance measurements of the NVMe SSD boot drive:

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/6029997/uploads/editor/e8/ggr9blmpzek3.png

The answers to my questions in the opening post:

Windows 10 will run properly on the Veriton X4610G.
An NVMe PCIe x16 gen 3 adapter card will work in the PCIe x16 (PCIe V2.0) slot.
The Veriton X4610G can boot from an M.2 NVMe SSD on the adapter card (any gen6 chip-set, such as the Q65 is able to). I needs a BIOS update to do so.

Here come crucial pointers for successful upgrade to Windows 10:

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/6029997/uploads/editor/at/9q0fn6uvt7kr.png

Remove the PCIe WiFi card from the system before you attempt an in-place-upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10. You can place it back after the upgrade is complete. Otherwise your upgrade will fail with error code: 0xC1900101-0x4000D and your upgrade will be rolled back. Your Windows 7 license will be upgraded to a Windows 10 digital license for free.

I used this NVMe M.2 to PCIe x4 adapter card. Buy a cheap / low spec'ed NVMe drive that supports 4 PCIe lanes. Your PCIe v2 bus speed will most likely be the limiting factor, but it will still be much faster than the fastest SATA SSD drives. Just be sure the NVMe SSD specs outperform the performance measurements I posted above to obtain maximum performance.

I formatted the NVMe SSD with GPT and did a clean UEFI install of Windows 10. (Start the Windows 10 upgrade drive in UEFI mode. Use F12 to enter the boot selector at startup to select the UEFI boot device.) The digital license will kick in automatically if you did the in-place-upgrade beforehand.

I upgraded my BIOS firmware with NVMe drivers on board, in order to boot from the NVMe drive in a Windows pre-boot environment.

Install XUbuntu 20.04 after you installed Windows 10 and let Grub 2 be your boot manager.

Enjoy your Veriton X4610G for many years to come now that processor speed is leveling off and Moore's law is breaking down.

Look here for Finding Windows 10x64 drivers for the Veriton X4610G.

billsey said:

@Marty11 I'm sorry I'm so slow in responding. The time I configured a machine to do UEFI from the HDD and still have the C: partition on the SSD I had an existing install on the HDD and the SSD blank. I booted the install flash drive and chose install on the SSD. I was actually a bit surprised when it left the three system partitions alone (100MB UEFI, 450MB Recovery, 1+GB Recovery) and created a C: partition that was the full size of the SSD. I figured to leave well enough alone and just wiped the old C: from the HDD and reformatted it as a data disk. The machine has run flawlessly and that was three years ago.

Hi Billsey,

Slightly off topic but I’m interested in configuring a Veriton X2631G to boot from SSD with UEFI. Am I correct in thinking that if I flash update the bios from version P21.B2 to P21.B4 this will do the trick? P21.B2 doesn’t seem to offer UEFI?

@RM1953
Can you start a new thread? I had a 13 year old PC with legacy mode only and was able to use SSD, need not be UEFI.

Additional info: I used Win 10x64 build 2004 to do the clean install with (booted it from a USB stick in UEFI mode).

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