Question 1

does this MB have shared PCIE lanes with the GPU?

Accepted Answer

if you were asking about PCIE lanes sharing. 
on the nova you have 3 PCIE slots:
- PCIE slot 1 is x16, (from CPU x8) if you have something in PCIE slot3 at x8?? (not sure)
- PCIE slot2 is x1  
- PCI slot3 is x16 (chipset) but gets disabled if your use the 5th nvme slot

Question 2

My M2 SSD is WD black with a heatsink preinstalled, will this fit in the M2 slot?

Accepted Answer

The devil is in the details...  you have few options... 
1) remove the heatsink that comes with the SSD and use the ones that come with board.
2) if your ssd is gen5 (or just the fastest) you can use the included ssd-heatsink on the very first M2 slot in place for the one provided by Nova. it is the M2 slot ABOVE the first PCIx16 slot. 
3) if the SSD is older and sluggish you can use the native SSD-heatsink in the M2 slot 5 which is all the way to the right side of the motherboard by itself.

Overall, it is a testimony to the attention to details of this board's designers. They did plan for a single dedicated heatsink for the first M2 slot as several gen5 SSD come with larger sometime active cooling aparatus.  That being said, they could have provided individual heatsinks for M2 slots 2/3/4 which would have been more versatile IMHO.

Question 3

What is the manufacturer if LAN chip?

Accepted Answer

Realtek. 
It is only 1 single LAN port, it is only 5GBE, it is only Realtek, it stopped working out of the blue a few weeks ago and I had to go to the realtek(not ASROCK) website to download their latest driver to recover (it seems to be a common issue, probably due to some recent incompatible windows update).

At this price point, I would have rather have a proper 10GB Intel chip and (or drop the wifi)... my 2 cents

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