wtf is up with modern motherboards
all the am5 boards I'm seeing have two or three pcie slots and then that's it, and they're all x16 for some reason
do people just not have anything other than a gpu now?? my low end am4 board has 3 16x slots and then three 1x slots because... they're basically free? just give me the extra slots! I want my network card and FireWire and whatnot!

@doskel the average gamer only installs a gpu

@doskel Most people have on-board WiFi and Audio these days, FireWire is out of popularity, most expansion cards are dead in the water. It’s sad, but unfortunately that’s where the market has been heading for 30 years.

@thatgalsilver I mean I get that most people don't use many cards but I'm just shocked how fast the change happened, it's been like 4 years and we've got half or a third the slots we used to

@doskel Genuinely I think the only reason we kept as many slots as we did during the AM4 days is because of legacy cruft and AMD being on the backfoot until midway through AM4, when they finally overcame Intel in the general consumer market.

@doskel My motherboard has one x16 and one x1 lmao.

@chjara okay but is it full-size atx-

@doskel microATX

@chjara yeah lol if they cut out some slots on smaller boards that's more understandable tbh

@doskel tbf it’s nice having full slots because my x16 slot is taken up by a 10 gig x4 card on my server, and the x1s aren’t open ended

but yeah it’d be nice if they chucked a couple x4s in between lol

@aidan yeah i do appreciate the slots, but like they're just leaving half the case slots completely empty which is just *silly*
my little b450 board is my ideal. 3 x16s, 3 x1s, that's perfect
x4s instead of x1s would be nice but you'd also probably start bumping up against cpu limits

@doskel 3 x16 slots!?!? are those all electrically x16 or just physically? I didn't realize modern ("consumer"/non-server) cpus/chipsets had that many pcie lanes. the only motherboard I have with more than one x16 slot is my power system L922 (which has 3 x16 slots and 6 x8 slots (4 of which are physically x16))

@noisytoot well in most configurations i see there's 1 16x 5.0 slot, then 1 16x 4.0 slot
on my am4 board they're all wired up for 16x but i don't think you can actually utilize them all at once

@doskel my understanding is am5 mandates usb4 support and most mobo makers allocate the remaining pcie lanes to nvme now. so there aren't leftover lanes anymore

@trwnh wow that's... understandable? still lame but at least it's not just The Gamer's Fault

@doskel i only know of one am4 gamer board that has more than two full length pcie slots… i own two of them

@mir the b450f gaming? that's my board at least
though i was a little mistaken because it's only got 2 3.0 x16s, the other is 2.0, and all the 1x slots are 2.0 as well, which is a little. silly. but it's still a whole lotta slots at least

@doskel it’s all M.2 now

my board has x16/x1/x4 (all with x16 physical), but supports 4 M.2 devices