It's a bit early in the game to have a stockpile of the Asus.
The new best NVMe SSDs, rather than the other way around. This is presumably so the NVMe connectors won't get in the way of airflow.
Fully loaded, this PCIe 3.0 x16 card can transfer data at up to 128Gbps (theoretical maximum). That is equivalent to 16,000MB/s, or 16GB/s. The caveat, other than the overall cost, is .
"Hyper M.2 x 16 card V2 is compatible with Intel Virtual RAID on U (VROC) and the AMD Ryzen™ Threadripper platform for NVMe RAID . Unused U PCle lanes can be assigned to storage, allowing you to create a bootable RAID array with multiple M.2 SSDs," Asus explains.
On compatible Intel systems, is further restricted to only Intel-brand SSDs. Otherwise, this can used on Intel X299, Z370, and Z390 motherboards, and AMD X399, X470, B450, X370, and B350 motherboards. While not listed, we imagine it would also work in X570 motherboards.
Asus has not announced pricing for this new iteration, though there are a couple of marketplace sellers on Amazon that have it listed for around $66.
