1
Motherboards with two x8 slots
(alien.top)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2023
1 points (100.0% liked)
Homelab
371 readers
2 users here now
Rules
- Be Civil.
- Post about your homelab, discussion of your homelab, questions you may have, or general discussion about transition your skill from the homelab to the workplace.
- No memes or potato images.
- We love detailed homelab builds, especially network diagrams!
- Report any posts that you feel should be brought to our attention.
- Please no shitposting or blogspam.
- No Referral Linking.
- Keep piracy discussion off of this community
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
PCIe is forwards and backwards compatible, so you can use a 3.0 card in a 2.0 slot or vice versa but if the board doesn’t have physically 8x or 16x slots it can require opening the end of the slot.
A lot of 10gbps NICs are 3.0 8x, but I think that is likely so that they still operated at full speed even in 2.0 slots which were probably more common ~10 years ago when such cards were new.
Apart from boards with two x8 slots it could be an option to go with a cheaper 16+4 board, HBA + NIC. With the HBA in the future you could add a SAS expander for more drives plus there are the onboard ones - some expanders can be powered via the PSU and don't need a PCIe slot.
For the sake of $100-150 I would probably go with a board with two 8x ports, it gives more flexibility in the future such as the option of a second HBA instead of an expander.
Looking into the ASRock Z790 Taichi Lite and it's predecessor a little more feature/spec wise it appears they are identical and the difference is cosmetic, losing some RGB and heatsink mass/covers.