Helpful article, thanks! I deal with this a lot, “So you want dual 1GB NICs for management, and dual 10Gb for communication, and dual FC cards for storage, and all in the cheapest, smallest server I can find? Lemme 'splain something . . .”
It’s the lack of usable lanes too
It seems pretty common to put a high-end CPU onto a motherboard with a mid/low-end chipset and then discover later the lack of available lanes and expansion slots while trying to add upgrades.
Yeah, I was looking at a PCIe 5.0 m.2 SSD for my Raptor Lake build, but unless motherboard designs change from the Z690 generation, it looks like with z790 doing that would necessitate dropping to x8 for my GPU. So it’s one compromise or another.