Yeah, my current (aging) motherboard also has gotchas like that you have to choose in the bios where to allocate PCIe lanes, so you end up not being able to use some of the SATA drive connections if you want to use both M.2 slots. And there’s the thing about putting the RAM sticks in the right slots to run in dual channel mode. And the switches and LED connectors for the case are all just random 2mm header pins in a clump, so you have to look up how the cables are supposed to tetris in there.
I’m not saying it’s challenging; it really is pretty straightforward. But it’s definitely not just “that’s right! it goes in the square hole!” level stuff.
Then there was mine that you had to put the M.2 in the second slot not the first or it would share bandwidth with the GPU making the GPU only run on 8 instead of 16 lanes. To make it less clear they put the extra cooling for the M.2 on the one you shouldn’t use!
Yeah, my current (aging) motherboard also has gotchas like that you have to choose in the bios where to allocate PCIe lanes, so you end up not being able to use some of the SATA drive connections if you want to use both M.2 slots. And there’s the thing about putting the RAM sticks in the right slots to run in dual channel mode. And the switches and LED connectors for the case are all just random 2mm header pins in a clump, so you have to look up how the cables are supposed to tetris in there.
I’m not saying it’s challenging; it really is pretty straightforward. But it’s definitely not just “that’s right! it goes in the square hole!” level stuff.
Then there was mine that you had to put the M.2 in the second slot not the first or it would share bandwidth with the GPU making the GPU only run on 8 instead of 16 lanes. To make it less clear they put the extra cooling for the M.2 on the one you shouldn’t use!