Ferrum MasterWell.. there are some tiny pcie 2x slot lanes from PCH that are often put in idiotic place where GPU covers them etc ... sometimes it is weird, I use a riser cable and route those spare lanes elsewhere... well just to point out, that the lanes are there, but... damn... the slots are routed often in rather weird way.

I came from X99 where you had them enough... but it is an artificial segregation, things like that should die... the fun part comes, that the most rational pcie layout comes with most expensive boards and they kinda intentionally make some stupid arrangement for more budget friendly options just because for the more expensive ones have some advantage. I didn't do X299 because of mesh topology, those CPU's suck at gaming and cost and arm and leg and offer you nothing more and HEDT really died recently as a thing, I do not treat Threadrippers as HEDT as those are different animals, more like home chibi server rendering farm. ie Like in old days I had Tyan Socket F duallies. The distinctive feature should be good at overclocking.

eidairaman1HEDT is what a Workstation Designation was

kapone32Ah Threadripper or X299.

Ferrum MasterWas.

Sucks for gaming and OC.

Still I will hold my point... the market is littered with poorly designed choices, a waste just to fill gaps. The design choices often are only like two or three types. During the old days the ITX segment was absent, now people having special needs and heavy integration migrate to that, but a custom system builder like me is left for paying for additional tax.

ValantarLuckily for you though, it seems that MSI's X670E/X670 boards might suit you well - all announced boards have three x16 slots with no mention of them being electrically anything below this (which begs the question of where they're getting the lanes, mind you), and one of them (seemingly the cheapest?) has an additional x1 slot.

Ferrum MasterWe will see, so far looks really promising.

ValantarYeah, they do look well suited to HEDT-like workloads. Still, considering how riddled with errors their press release is I'd wait until the boards are launched before forming any firm opinions. For example, they say "The X670 chipset is divided into two segments - X670 Extreme and X670. X670E supports PCIe 5.0 through both the PCIe slot and M.2 slot whereas X670 motherboards support PCIe 5.0 through the M.2 slot exclusively." But that's not the difference between X670E and X670 - that's the difference between X670 and B650! Either MSI's marketing department is getting some really bad information, they're rather incompetent, or they got the info far too late to actually proofread their press copy. Either way, it doesn't build confidence.

Valantarall announced boards have three x16 slots with no mention of them being electrically anything below this (which begs the question of where they're getting the lanes, mind you)

trsttteYeah, there's not that much information. Even regarding X670/X670E from my understanding the non-E can still have pcie5.0 on the gpu slot, it's just not the target, while the Extreme version has to. I really don't like that they went the Intel way segmenting more the chipset versions, hopefully they'll release a couple official block diagrams soon so things become clearer.

trsttteThose are definitely not all x16 electric. Educated and obvious guess is first 2 PCIe gen5 are bifurcated (either 1 x16 or 2 x8), third one x4