The death of the PCIe expansion card
This is interesting, but honestly a little pointless, and misses the real issue.<p>I&#x27;ll address it line-by-line.<p>&gt; Lack of USB ports<p>My motherboard has 8 USB ports of varying capability on the rear I&#x2F;O block. It has two internal headers to add <i>another</i> 8 USB ports. That&#x27;s 16 ports. It&#x27;s not even a very expensive or feature-rich motherboard... it&#x27;s an MSI X570 Gaming Edge Wifi... $209.99 on release date at MicroCenter in 2019.<p>&gt; Thunderbolt ports so you can attach monitors, USB devices, and even externally-mounted PCIe cards with a single daisy-chainable cable<p>Who exactly is doing this, when most video cards have 2 or 3 DisplayPort connectors on them...? External PCIe cards? For what purpose?<p>&gt; WiFi cards so you can get higher network speeds and lower latency without a cable<p>Present on most motherboards, even budget options around $125. Nowadays, you can even switch the card out by unscrewing the shield, unscrewing the wire tension screws, and popping in a new M.2 WiFi card. Why suck up a PCIe slot when a small M.2 WiFi card slot fits?<p>&gt; Network cards so you can have additional and&#x2F;or faster Ethernet ports<p>Already built into every modern motherboard. Many have two. Higher-end boards have 10gig NICs. Some have two. Why would you need more than two NICs in your machine?* (See below)<p>&gt; TV tuners so you can receive, watch, and time-shift local over-the-air content<p>This may be the <i>single</i> place where the author has a point, since the only way to view OTA content via stream is to either pay for Hulu, DirecTV Stream, Fubo, YouTubeTV, and then input your zip code.<p>&gt; Video capture cards so you can stream or record video feeds from game consoles or non-USB cameras<p>There are plenty of excellent USB devices to accomplish this, you don&#x27;t need a PCI Express-based solution.<p>&gt; SATA or SAS adapters so you can attach additional hard drives and SATA SSDs<p>Almost every motherboard, certainly every ATX motherboard of the past 10 years or so I&#x27;ve seen, has standard at least 6 SATA ports. Smaller ITX boards may only have 2 or 4, but if that&#x27;s your design, you&#x27;ve already committed yourself to a lack of PCI Express slots.<p>&gt; M.2 adapters so you can attach additional NVME SSDs<p>Most mid-range motherboards have at least two of these. High-end motherboards have up to 4. This still doesn&#x27;t solve your primary problem that I&#x27;m going to address here in a moment.<p>&gt; Sound cards so you can run a home theater surround sound system from your PC without needing a receiver (RIP Windows Media Center)<p>Realtek cornered the market here with onboard audio, and it is actually surprisingly good for their higher-end options. Yes, you could get an older HT|Omega card, or a SoundBlaster AE-5&#x2F;7&#x2F;9, but why?<p>&gt; Legacy adapters for older devices that use serial, parallel, or PCI (non-Express) to connect to the computer<p>I&#x27;m not even sure what you&#x27;d attach that&#x27;s that old... and more importantly, why...<p>**** THE ACTUAL PROBLEM ****<p>Everything the author of this blog pointed out is an issue, but most, if not nearly all of them, have been solved by motherboards integrating more and more features onto them. This is the reason I don&#x27;t get salty about buying a new $400 motherboard from ASUS, or MSI, or Gigabyte or whoever. I get a high-end sound card (usually a Realtek ALC4080, which supports 7.1 channel surround sound + optical S&#x2F;PDIF), a 2.5 to 10 gig NIC, WiFi 6 or 6E, 8-12 USB ports including Type-A &amp; Type-C, multiple M.2 slots (some motherboards support up to 5 now).<p>Turn the clock back 20 years or so. Hell, go back to 1997, when the first WiFi router was sold.<p>You&#x27;d have to buy your motherboard. You&#x27;d have to buy your NIC. You&#x27;d have to buy your WiFi card. You&#x27;d have to buy your sound card. That&#x27;s four components in one. But wait... most motherboards had TWO... at best FOUR... USB ports. So you need to buy at least one or two USB hubs to get up to the 8 to 12 ports modern motherboards have <i>on their rear I&#x2F;O connectors alone</i>.<p>No.<p>The problem is <i>not</i> &quot;lack of PCI Express slots&quot;.<p>The problem is lack of PCI Express lanes. How do you expect to drive all this awesome shit you wanna throw into your tower case? The MSI Z690 MEG UNIFY has two PCI Express 5.0 x16 slots and one PCI Express 5.0 x4 slot. And guess what... your single x4 slot is off-limits, because you&#x27;re gonna buy a Samsung 990 Pro NVMe SSD (which is gonna use those 4 lanes), and will certainly saturate it with it&#x27;s 1,600,000 IOPS and 8-9000 MB&#x2F;s transfer rate.<p>SLI and CrossFire are still supported technologies, even though, frankly, no one could <i>afford</i> to use them in the past two years, but that&#x27;s changing. The cratering of cryptocurrencies and the uncontrolled dive that GPUs are currently experiencing means dual video card solutions may be back on the table for gamers. Hell, I&#x27;ve seen used RTX 3080s sell for $440 on eBay by the time of auction expiry. Sub-$1000 for dual RTX 3080 still outperforms a single RTX 3090 Ti. But even those are dropping like a shit from heaven. I saw one for sale on eBay for $1059. $2120 for 100+ FPS at 4K, with ultra settings, and ray-tracing activated? Why not? Lots of people were buying single RTX 3090s for $2400 just a year ago.<p>No, the problem is lack of PCI Express lanes available.<p>We thought AMD had rode to our rescue with Threadripper. 64 to 128 PCI Express lanes &quot;ought to be enough for just about anybody&quot;. Enthusiasts bought Threadripper to easily run dual GPU setups and dual or quad NVMe setups.<p>You didn&#x27;t even have to &quot;go nuts&quot;. You could pick up a Threadripper 2950X for it&#x27;s 16 cores for as little as $799 on release. It gave you 64 lanes. The 3960X supported 88 lanes... Hell, even with dual GPUs and quad NVMe drives, you still had room for another 40 lanes of equipment.<p>No. The problem is not the lack of slots. The problem is the lack of lanes.<p>We thought Lisa Su had rode to our rescue against Intel and their stingy horseshit antics, only to find out she&#x27;s not only just as bad, she&#x27;s arguably worse... because after being the also-ran, far-in-the-distance, second-tier shitpick of a brand, AMD turned their backs on the gamers and enthusiasts that brought the company back from the brink. Threadripper is now priced so far out of the reach of the enthusiast as to be a non-starter.<p>But that is your real problem. The lack of PCI Express <i>lanes</i>. Not slots.