Remove the second CPU PCIe slot and give us a second CPU USB hub to split our high polling input devices on, or something worth while. No one uses that 8 electrical PCIe slot anyways. Who wants to have their GPU running in 8x for gaming? I've tried it before and the quality diminishes. It's been the most useless waisted slot in history
I vote for the opposite, make a second x16-slot from CPU (electrical x8) standard, better even two (x8/x8/x4)
Because I was talking about boards that split the CPU lanes into 08x /08x AM4 offered 24 PCIe lanes, AM5 offers 28 PCIe lanes. Chipsets and board vendors mix up the whole bag but I'm not so sure there is much of a market that needs those first direct 16 PCIe CPU lanes split over another 16x 8 electrical slot when most of the time there is a 4x pcie slot from the chipset and a lot of connectivity offered on the back I/O I mean who needs firewire or scsi pcie cards anymore? What else could be used in those slots? Sound card? Usually used in the 4x slot. Ugh, it just kills me sometimes when I think about it
There could be a market. AM5 is better suited for budget workstations than any other mainstream-plattforms because of 16-core CPU (even more cores in the future?), ECC-RAM and lots of PCIe5.0. You can use a second Gen5x8-slot to put the VGA into, then use a x16-to-4xM.2-Adapter for Gen5-SSD, or you can use the iGPU, 2xM.2 Gen5 onboard and the 4xM.2-Adapter for 6xM.2 Gen5 total
The best scenario would be
16x pcie lanes from the CPU for the GPU
4x pcie lanes from the CPU for nvme
4x pcie lanes from the cpu for USB
4x pcie lanes from the CPU dedicated to a 4x slot and not on a switch
4x pcie lanes from the chipset in a 4x slot
nvme storage drives can be hosted on the chipset
the problem is the wasted board relestate with the 2nd 16x slot 8 electircal swithced from the 16x GPU CPU lanes
That would be a proper high end chipset board
Why do you want 4xPCIe for USB? Thinking of USB4? That only uses Gen4x4, so 4 lanes from PCH would be enough. Only USB4v2/TB5 with asymmetrical 120/40GB/s will need Gen5x4.
Ideal for me would be:
1x16/x8 Gen5 from CPU for GPU, 4xM.2 or 200GbE
1x8/x0 Gen5 from CPU for GPU, 2xM.2 or 100GbE
1-2x4 Gen5 from CPU, shared with 1-2xM.2, for NVMe, USB4v2/TB5 (or USB4/TB4 atm), 25/50GbE, SAS-RAID-Controller
2x4 Gen4 from PCH, shared with M.2 for 10GbE, USB4/TB4, SATA-Controller, HDMI-Video-Capture
2-3x1 Gen4 for Soundcard, TV-Tuner, SATA
X870E should atleast have 5GbE + WiFi7, but can have 10GbE (Marvell Aqtion AQC113C can use 1xGen4 or 2xGen3)
I understand this is all subjective but PC gaming is a HUGE market so let's get into this anyways. My opinions are based around optimal gaming connectivity. Back to the extra 8x electrical slot, it's a moot point because it really doesn't take away the total amount of CPU lanes overall but it does take away board real-estate and that still sucks. It's not gaming orientated anymore and a waisted add-on. No one is running SLI or Crossfire, I even forgot what they used to be called, lol. Of course it could be useful for storage to run off a card in that slot but imo your primary cpu nvme m.2 is enough in that regard. It's better to have a second dedicated pcie slot for a card on CPU lanes for reduced latency in gaming: gaming needs to be as close to real time as possible than storage drives. Whether it's a sound card on that slot or a sperate USB hub to seperate input periphreals then again that's better than storage drives taking priority when in fact they are ... storage drives. Again, gaming latency takes priority so IMO storage drives don't need that reduced latency. In my experience reducing the 16x GPU lanes to 8x to share with a pcie card brought a noticeable degradation in performance. That was years ago with my 3800X. If I could try this again I would but thanks to ridiculously large size upper tier GPU sizes I can't right now. My ideas might be caught in an atiqutated era so feel free to correct me if I am wrong. What's the gaming market worth now? 29 billion last I heard?
SLI/Crossfire are dead and were never really useful. Gaming doesn't neet anything. You need a Gen4x16-Slot (next gen GPUs will use Gen5, but it won't make any difference with 16 Lanes) and one M.2-slot. Again, Gen3, 4 or 5 doesn't make any difference for games. As doesn't RAM-clock. Wake up, you only need 7800X3D (or 9800X3D), enough RAM, one NVMe and the rest of the budget should go into GPU.
I still don't see why you would need your secondary PCI-e slot to run from the CPU.
Sound card? Only a handful of audiophiles still use them. Graphics cards being able to process audio basically killed this market.
What are you talking about? GPUs processing audio? Only thing they can do with audio is outputting digital oudio via HDMI or DP. The days of PCIe-soundcards might be over in facour of USB, both only with audiophiles because onboard codecs on good boards are really good (ALC1220/4080/4082, not that ALC897-Crap), but every good pcie soundcard that anyone ever bought will allways be better than todays onboard codecs.