I’m more concerned with PCI slots blocked by massive GPUs, especially on smaller form factor boards. You’ll need PCI/e extension cables to install an additional card.
There are not many cards you need these days, especially not that doesn’t have an USB equivalent. USB capture cards are now decent, same for Wi-Fi+Bluetooth ones (provided to buy one with deported antennas). Other than storage related ones (for moar m.2!, or for sff SAS ports), I don’t see that much uses these days.
Even my NAS, which uses a micro-ATX MB, only uses one slot on the 3 available. And all its 4 m.2 ports are used (2 for redundant system discs, one for an AI accelerators (for Frigate object detection), the last one being an old SSD used as ZFS cache for my main disk array (will probably be replaced by another AI accelerator once I find another use which would need one).
It’s the obsession with replacing PCIe slots with M.2 sockets that gets me.
I’m more concerned with PCI slots blocked by massive GPUs, especially on smaller form factor boards. You’ll need PCI/e extension cables to install an additional card.
There are not many cards you need these days, especially not that doesn’t have an USB equivalent. USB capture cards are now decent, same for Wi-Fi+Bluetooth ones (provided to buy one with deported antennas). Other than storage related ones (for moar m.2!, or for sff SAS ports), I don’t see that much uses these days.
Even my NAS, which uses a micro-ATX MB, only uses one slot on the 3 available. And all its 4 m.2 ports are used (2 for redundant system discs, one for an AI accelerators (for Frigate object detection), the last one being an old SSD used as ZFS cache for my main disk array (will probably be replaced by another AI accelerator once I find another use which would need one).
Why not? I think its quite convenient. Also saves some required wiring and its very compact
Motherboards seem to have a normal amount of slots though?
Not like you can populate them all anyway, though. Use one modern (i.e. oversized) graphics card and it seems to block three slots.