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The death of the PCIe expansion card
- rr888 4y agoWith lack of expansion cards combined with m2 drives modern PCs are looking completely different to just 10 years ago. Just a big motherboard with a video card and a massive cooler. Those big cases look mostly empty. All the wiring is just for RGB now. :)
- Kerrick 4y agoEven spinning-disk hard drive arrays (another good way to fill out a large case) don't get much love since SSDs have gotten cheaper and people rely more on cloud storage. My next rig will, at least, continue to have an ever-growing number of 18TB hard drives as a huge volume managed by Windows Storage Spaces.
- Gigachad 4y agoMost people just don't have that much data. Those huge HDD arrays were mostly used for pirated media but these days most people are on streaming. Even for games, it's usually easier to just delete the games you aren't using and download them back when you want to play them. Many modern cases opt for only one or even no HDD bays because it makes the case look cleaner, smaller and gives it better airflow. Gone are the days where most cases had top to bottom bays of DVD and HDD slots
- selfhoster11 4y agoHDD arrays for “Linux ISOs” have never been better. In fact, I’m pretty sure that modern day is something of a golden era thanks to the dropping prices per TB on spinning media.
- preisschild 4y agoYup. Currently building a new storage setup with 18TB disks. Each of my 18TB HDD is also backed by a 512GB NVME cache to speed the already fast HDDs up. Distributed raids (like ceph and glusterfs) and raid expansion (recently added in zfs) also make it easy for a homelabber to get started cheap and continuously add new disks.
- adastra22 4y agoRoswell still makes 24x bay 4U cases, and there is backblaze.
- rr888 4y agoRight, my new PC has an m2 ssd and a NAS in the closet.
- markbnj 4y agoI haven't used more than two PCIe slots for a long time now. My current asus mobo has ... 4 I think, and I use two: one for the evga gpu and another for a usb 3.0 card I had lying about.
- Gigachad 4y agoSince every board started coming with built in Wifi it's been a while since I used any more than 1. I'm not sure what all the panic over PCI is when all the stuff we used to use these cards for is just built in now.
- HereIGoAgain 4y agoOh this can only go good places long-term and never end badly. ** mainly Intel!
- silksowed 4y ago"The Death of the Consumer PCIe Expansion Card". just a friendly reminder that in the data center world pcie isn't going anywhere soon
- causi 4y agoI do miss expandability and features. Nothing quite matches the look of nerd envy I got when I popped a folding bluetooth mouse out of my laptop's ExpressCard slot.
- mxuribe 4y ago> ...a folding bluetooth mouse out of my laptop's ExpressCard slot... Say what!?! How have i never heard of this until today!?! @causi Would you mind sharing a link to whatever cool mouse you had? Thanks!
- causi 4y agoSure. The original HP RJ316AA PCMCIA version was probably more comfortable, but I had the MoGo X54 ExpressCard model which was still pretty good. Both of them charged via the card slot. I wish laptops still came with an ExpressCard slot just for that mouse; I hated giving it up. Plenty of pictures and data on them if you Google the names.
- ZekeSulastin 4y agoHere’s the PCMCIA version Causi mentioned; I had one of these back in the day: https://the-gadgeteer.com/2006/07/27/newton_peripherals_mogo_mouse/ https://the-gadgeteer.com/2006/07/27/newton_peripherals_mogo...
- structural 4y agoYour article mentions M.2 to PCIe adapters, and having just worked with a few of these in the lab, some extra information for you: 1. The ADT-Link parts that you see on AliExpress are the most common ones; most other parts you see will be rebadged or resold versions of those. If you're looking to play around with one of these, http://www.adtlink.cn/en/product/R42.html http://www.adtlink.cn/en/product/R42.html is resold on Mouser as https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/DFRobot/FIT0782?qs=ljCeji4nMDnR9DkMEaM0Xw%3D%3D https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/DFRobot/FIT0782?qs=ljCe... 2. There's some mechanical compatibility issues with these adapters due to the screws connecting the cable to the M.2 card: M.2 connectors on the motherboard side come in various heights and not all have sufficient room for the bottom of the screw to not hit the motherboard and prevent the card from being fully inserted. That said, the adapters work great at PCIe Gen 3 speeds. I probably wouldn't expect them to work above that in the general case.
- mikeInAlaska 4y agoMy PC I just built, a Ryzen 5950x with an X570S chipset, has the least PCIe slots I've ever had on a PC. (3) Plus... if you use the second slot, it cuts your graphics card down to x8 PCIe lanes, so no way !!! And if you use the third slot, it disables one of the on board NVME drive slots. This I had no choice. So, in the end I had room for the graphics card and a single 10 gigabit ethernet adapter.
- rambojazz 4y agoCutting down lanes sucks, but your GPU should still work fine on x8, with only minuscule difference (or none at all).
- rwmj 4y agoThis has been going on since the second IBM PC (probably). On the original PC even RAM expansion was on an ISA card, and there were cards for serial, parallel, floppy disk, CGA, MDA and probably more. Those functions were gradually moved first to the motherboard and then into the processor until it became the SoC we have today.
- hakfoo 4y agoThe original 5150 PC had 5 slots. The followup XT had 8 (one nonstandard) because 5 was skimpy, especially before high integration-- if you needed a whole slot for just a serial port or a battery backed clock, and seperate cards for floppy and hard discs, they ran short fast.
- nr2x 4y agoFor audio you often get a ton of electronic noise on a PCIe card that isn’t present with an external device. Even the few PCIe still around use breakout boxes.
- dec0dedab0de 4y agoand here I am wanting a modern computer with regular PCI slots to use old hardware
- Kerrick 4y agoYou can at least get PCIe to PCI adapters. https://www.startech.com/en-us/cards-adapters/pex1pci1 https://www.startech.com/en-us/cards-adapters/pex1pci1
- GekkePrutser 4y agoThis article title is BS. PCIe is alive and well. We just need it for less things because a lot of good stuff is already on board and it now appears in more form factors namely Thunderbolt and M.2. We will still need it for graphics, fast SSDs, fibre channel and 10G Ethernet etc
- structural 4y agoThe title is accurate, though. The use of PCIe is exploding everywhere, but we're putting it in every other interface and the "PCIe expansion card" connector and form factor is seeing relatively less use overall.
- GekkePrutser 4y agoIt's not 'dead' at all, that's what I was referring to. It's not going anywhere either for the remaining usecases.
- Gigachad 4y agoBecause everything is standardizing. You don't need ports for TV tuners or proprietary camera memory cards anymore. Everything you do need is now built in to the mobo.
- Havoc 4y agoAn the flip side this does open up some up-cycling opportunities on the prior gen being retired. Take old gaming PC, throw out GFX sitting in the x16 gen4 slot and replace it with a bifurcation card for nvmes. Should make for a decent proxmox machine with has zfs storage
- Taniwha 4y agoserdes .... it's serdes all the way down .... There's a growing trend in SoCs of just having serdes blocks - because these days PCIe, high speed ether, USB/thunderthing, sata etc etc are all just variants on the same high-speed technology - different protocols are just different MACs on top of a common serdes block
- marktangotango 4y agoInteresting, can anyone point out some SOCs with multiple serdes? As an interested, non embedded developer, I know high end fpga do, but I'm not aware of any SOCs. Also how hard is it to layout pcb for these? Is length matching sufficient?
- phendrenad2 4y agoLength matching with a ground plane on the layer below will get you to USB 3.0 or PCIe 2.0 maybe. Maybe higher speeds need special PCB surfaces? Vias embedded in BGA lands? Not sure. Probably also would want to do simulation of the EMF for all the traces on the board, and software for that is "email us for a quote" expensive.
- Taniwha 4y agoOh yeah at these speeds everything is a microwave stripline
- mxfh 4y agoI was bewildered at this because I couldn’t imagine anybody who would find 5 NVME SSDs and two PCIe cards more useful than the inverse Never tried running a 4x2TB striped NVME PCIe 4.0 scratch disk? This stuff just lets you forget about what used to be a bottleneck. No need for RAM-drives.
- voldacar 4y agoI remember back in the original nvidia GTX Titan era (2013 ish?) it wasn't uncommon for TOTL gaming rigs to have 2, 3, even 4 GPUs. At some point that just ceased to be a thing
- nocman 4y ago"The Death of the PCIe Expansion Card" seems like an extreme description of the latest set of motherboards having "fewer than five" PCIe slots. Yeah, the numbers have shrunk over time, but I think that's probably due to USB and perhaps to some extent HDMI making an expansion card unnecessary. Also, motherboards have enough hard drive controllers in them now that most people who would add a hard drive to their PC have no reason to need an expansion card to do so. I don't particularly like the trend either, but I think PCIe is far from dead at this point.
- Kerrick 4y agoIt's not just a description of the latest set of motherboards having fewer than five PCIe slots. It's a description of the PC expansion market as a whole, including the fact that many things that would've been PCIe expansion cards "back in the day" are now built into motherboards, sold as USB/Thunderbolt devices, and/or available as M.2 cards. The journey of discovery it took for me to realize this was simply kicked off by the dearth of PCIe slots on announced AM5 motherboards.
- nocman 4y agoYeah, I guess what I was trying to say is, "PCIe isn't dead, it just smells funny." :-D
- lukeh 4y agoStill popular in some areas of pro audio and video industries. eg. Avid HDX and UAD DSP cards can eat up a few slots, combine that with a SSD and GPU and suddenly your 2019 Mac Pro is full up.
- _carbyau_ 4y agoOne point regarding slots on a motherboard though is space. There is only so much 2D space on a board. When adding in M.2 slots the PCIe slots immediately took a hit. For me, I like the M.2 slot on the back of the board. I'd like it more if it were a standard so case makers can assure access. Also, I understand it might be a bit fragile but is there any reason why M.2 slots can't stick straight up and out of the motherboard? Maybe with some support around whatever you plugin. Sticking straight up and out would provide all around cooling for the stick of whatever AND save motherboard 2D space.
- Ukudala 4y agoShout-out to the 2280 M.2 slot, fantastic functionality for smaller footprint items like chip carrier boards, like NVIDIA Jetson chips. For those who don't know, check these out: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/autonomous-machines/embedded-systems/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/autonomous-machines/embedded-sy...
- shaggie76 4y agoI personally find this sad because multi-GPU is an excellent way to optimize compute/watt for enthusiast scientific computing (Folding@Home etc). Back when I was still contributing power to SETI@home I analyzed the results database and concluded that by and large GPUs did substantially more work/watt-hour and that the mid-range parts were the ideal price-point (GTX 1070 at the time); my best rig had 4x GTX 1070's in it which is an excellent balance in many respects. It's a dinosaur now, and when it finally croaks I don't know if I'll try to replace it.
- phendrenad2 4y agoThis is just motherboard manufacturers segmenting their market and overcharging the high-end so they can reduce costs on the low-end. If you need four PCIe 16x cards you really NEED it, and you'll pay $300, $500, maybe $1000 per board to get it.
- SergeAx 4y agoI really like the "Ship of Theseus" take. My own desktop PC still has that one slot cover from my first PC from 1990s. This is a deliberate nod to all the history of upgrades and migrations that was so much fun to do. By the way, my own modus operandi was to choose a mid-level hardware for upgrades, exactly to keep the budget low by keeping as much older parts as possible.
- PaulHoule 4y agoThe PC industry has been scroogling users on I/O since the late 2000's, the main entity to blame is Intel with its vainglorious plan to take over the complete BoM for PCs. Now AMD is at the center of the phenomenon.
- CharlesW 4y ago> The PC industry has been scroogling users on I/O since the late 2000's… What does this mean? (I'm familiar with the Microsoft ad campaign, but that doesn't make sense to me in this context.)
- PaulHoule 4y agoUnfortunately it's an obscure topic because people have been so dependent on laptops and phones that few people know about the regression of desktop PCs. Here's a simple example. I found an old i3 PC from Intel in my house that was left by one of my son's friends. The CPU is artificially limited to 16 PCI lanes. You might think you could plug a discrete GPU in, it only uses 16 lanes, but no, some of those lanes are consumed by storage, USB ports, super I/O, etc. So this computer is e-waste now because it can't be upgraded to keep up. This kind of delinquency is only possible because Intel has pushed barely-functional integrated "GPU"s. Back in the 1980s and 1990s you had to know some rules about how interrupts were assigned to slots to build a working PC. Since the early 2000's, PC builders face a number of barely documented rules about how PCI lanes are assigned which boil down to "i3 and i5 are e-waste, buying a budget or mid-range motherboard is a waste of money because upgrading your machine will be a matter of 'you can't get here from there'"
- yourusername 4y agoEven with 8 lanes available a GPU should work fine. If it's a very high end GPU it won't run at full speed but this is a old i3 so probably not a issue. Some low end GPU's only use 4 lanes to begin with. Did it actually fail to work when you added a GPU?
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- guardiangod 4y agoYup I ran out of PCIe slots in my last computer- 1x Bluetooth+Wifi adapter (offload the USB bus) 1x Highpoint USB 3 controller (the only USB3 controller that is reliable for work) 1x Quad network ports adapter 1x Video card Things I wanted to install but couldn't- 1x M.2 nvme adapter card 1x Video card
- duffyjp 4y agoConsider yourself lucky. During the GPU apocalypse I managed a Newegg Shuffle for a GPU that included this motherboard: https://www.newegg.com/gigabyte-b550m-ds3h/p/N82E16813145210 https://www.newegg.com/gigabyte-b550m-ds3h/p/N82E16813145210 Fast-forward a bit and I used it to build my kid a new machine, except my old RTX 2060 was a "2.5 slot" card which means it's literally the one and only PCIe card I can install. I had to get him a USB wifi adapter...
- mxuribe 4y ago> ...During the GPU apocalypse... @duffyjp : Maybe i'm mis-reading your comment here...but are we out of the GPU apocalypse yet? Genuinely curious, because I've been holding out getting a small desktop PC for homelab use. (Yes, yes, i know for server homelab stuff i don't really need a GPU, but GPU pricing i think tends to portend overall computing cost nowadays.)
- easrng 4y agoExpect GPU prices to go down in a little over a week from now
- RainaRelanah 4y agoThe shortage is basically over, and nvidia severely over-purchased fab capacity from TSMC for the 4000 series. Prices have tanked and will likely keep going down unless nvidia can sell off the 5nm fab time.
- mmastrac 4y agoDo you have enough lanes overall? I wonder if a splitter might work for your needs.
- NotYourLawyer 4y agoThe rise of laptops seems like the big one to me. Why would I make a device in a PCIe format and alienate a huge chunk of my market, instead of using USB-whatever?
- thro388 4y agoFirst batch of AM5 mobos are high-added value, makers want to make most money on selling buzzwords. Normal consumer grade mobos (with many PCIe slots) will propably follow latter.
- LegitShady 4y agoI have a large graphics card that takes up 3ish slots of PCIe on its own even if it's only taking the 16 lanes it gets. There's room at the bottom for a wifi card with an external antenna that is connected by wires to the rp-sma connectors on the card. That's it. That's all the room k have on a full size tower. I used to have a FireWire card fory audio interface but replaced it with a usb-c model to not worry about FireWire support in current year.
- Kerrick 4y agoThat's another thing that bothers me about motherboard manufacturer's choices around PCIe -- one that I didn't cover in the article. Why on earth are they choosing (even on EATX motherboards) to put the extra PCIe slots within 1-2 spaces of the primary GPU slot, when they are so incredibly likely to be covered up? Instead, that's a great place to put the M.2 slots. Move the few remaining PCIe slots down, so they can actually be used.
- justinlloyd 4y agoUnfortunately you cannot actually "move the slots down" due to how motherboards and CPUs work and still keep everything compliant and correctly timed. You can put in a PCIe extender, stiff (daughterboard) or flexible (ribbon or bracket) which works, but you are playing the game of "it might work, it might not" and juggling three variables of motherboard timings/quality, PCIe card timings/quality and extender quality. You don't know if it'll work until you try it. There's multiple reasons why those slots are where they are. I have two ASUS dual CPU workstation motherboards and run some of the devices with PCIe ribbon extensions. I cannot run my Highpoint U.2 RAID card on an extension but I can run a Highpoint USB 3 card just fine. I can run a 2070 GPU just fine, but the RTX A5000 GPUs are flakey. The dual Blackmagic quad 4k capture cards want to be in specific motherboard slots and work okay on one particular brand (Thermaltake) of extension cable. The problem is nuanced.
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- dylan604 4y agoOh the days of buying PCIe expansion chassis to get the cards required to fit into your system. When 3 slots were not enough, boom, now you have 7 in just twice the square footage and twice the power needs.
- CosmicShadow 4y agoI just built a new PC after like 8 years and had to buy a cheaper mobo in order to get access to more PCIe slots. I was baffled why there were so few on them and was wondering if I could even fit 2 video cards on the one I originally wanted. I almost hit buy before I went wait, no something does look wrong, where the hell are all the slots! Definitely a bit of a worrying trend. I expect mobile devices to get shittier and shittier as they remove expandable memory and headphone jacks, but not my precious PCs with so many components to choose from and customize with. Luckily I didn't really need to put any of my old stuff into my new rig so it does indeed look empty. I got that Fractal case that seems like a dream for customizability and it feels like a waste that I'm not utilizing it.
- johnklos 4y ago...and instead of USB 5.0, we have USB 4, version 2.0, probably so they can snicker when we realize it's USB 420...
- Kerrick 4y agoHa! I even snarkily made fun of the USB naming structure in the article, but I didn't catch that the Promoter Group embedded a 420 joke.
- formerly_proven 4y agoUnfortunately most mainstream boards have one PEG / PCIe x16 slot, one M.2 slot and maybe 1-3 PCIe x1 slots (usually x1, even if they are x4/x16 mechanically). Those ancillary PCIe slots are generally multiplexed through the chipset and 1-2 generations behind the CPU's PCIe generation, so they aren't even good enough for networking or another SSD (not much faster than SATA, so what's the point). Even USB-C remains a niche feature on the latest socket 1700 (Intel) and AM4 (AMD, presumably extending to AM5), despite being standard on laptops for years. Part of this is because graphics are often not on the motherboard, so the motherboard has to include a DP-in socket to support graphics out over USB-C.
- MisterTea 4y agoThis is on the heels of "what happened to the discreet sound card?" Let me ask you this: What is left to plug in? Most removable gadgets are USB because USB is fast enough. The devices which actually need the bandwidth, latency or memory mapping are already on the motherboard. And the people who need more are a minority. The only real use case for PCIe to the average PC user is for connecting a GPU or NVMe. Moving forwards I see the converged hodgepodge of USB4 and beyond killing the x1-x4 PCIe slot with servers being the last hold out for high slot counts.
- cbozeman 4y agoWe're being nickel and dimed and upsold on high-end workstations for something that another poster in this thread already established was cheap... right up until Broadcom bought the company that made the cheap alternative chip. It's so fucking American, isn't it? If you can't beat someone with your technical superiority, buy them out.
- JoeAltmaier 4y agoHappens all the time! I was in a startup bought out to kill our product.
- MarkusWandel 4y agoI'm running the kind of eclectic setup that expansion slots were meant for. A board that has three full length PCI-E slots in it, with three video cards. Running a multiseat machine (i.e. truly independent login stations) pretty much requires a video chip per seat. It's been an interesting ride. Graphics card fans weren't really meant for 24x7 operations. After a recent power failure, gummed up lubricant caused one not to start again, and the card suffered heat death. Also multi-seat login was abandoned, i.e. broken and tmk never fixed, in GDM, so I have to use LightDM with no alternatives. Also there were stability issues with nVidia cards, but three Radeon cards work fine. Possibly with the latest hardware, a GPU-per-seat setup could be done with Thunderbolt? Anyway meanwhile we soldier on on the cheap, with a circa 2012 vintage ultra-high-end gamer machine still providing adequate compute power for all the screens in the house.
- justinlloyd 4y agoIt is unfortunate that the consumer grade GPUs cannot be shared in Proxmox/ESXi/UNRAID like you can with the "pro" level cards. One of the four major benefits of going with RTX A5000 cards over 3090's was that I can share one or more GPUs amongst several virtual machines, i.e. Shared Passthrough and Mutl-vGPU.
- Dylan16807 4y ago> Graphics card fans weren't really meant for 24x7 operations. Are those seats highly active all the time? If not, plenty of GPUs have fans that shut off when idle.
- zamadatix 4y agohttps://github.com/Arc-Compute/LibVF.IO/tree/master/ https://github.com/Arc-Compute/LibVF.IO/tree/master/ plus https://github.com/gnif/LookingGlass https://github.com/gnif/LookingGlass works pretty well. If you use an Intel GPU, particularly one of their new Arc dedicated GPUs, it supports the functionality on the consumer grade hardware without any trickery and you just need Looking Glass to map the outputs. If you really want multiple GPUs though you can also use a normal 1-in-4-out type PCIe switch and save a lot of cost on Thunderbolt components in-between. Low bandwidth ones are particularly dirt cheap due to crypto mining volume. Keep an eye out for ACS support or you may have to use an ACS override patch though.
- kmeisthax 4y agoOne related issue is the death of integrated PCIe switches on motherboards. High-end boards used to have PCIe hubs on them so you could plugin in a lot of cards and still get all the bandwidth out of a 16-lane CPU. The reason why they don't do this is because PLX got bought out by Broadcom and they jacked up the price of the chips. It turns out their most lucrative market was storage, because datacenters want to connect a lot of high-speed NVMe to one machine and they will pay buckets for a chip that will let them all share bandwidth. So now consumers that want a lot of devices need a CPU with a lot of lanes, which meant buying into a more expensive high-end desktop platform with more than the standard of 16 or 20 lanes on it. Except these are also becoming scarce; both Intel and AMD's high-end desktop platforms haven't been updated in years. The way high-end used to work was that they were just last-gen server chips with overclocking and more consumer-oriented boards, so they got the extra lanes and memory capacity, but you still got the gobs of USB and so on that you'd see on a consumer board. So with no lane expanders on motherboards anymore, and no high-end platforms with higher lane count CPUs in them, the only other option for buying something with lots of slots in it is to buy server gear. Not only is that more expensive, but you also lose out on all the consumer-grade creature comforts you expect[0] and have to deal with the added noise of small fans in a rackmount case. [0] VGA is considered standard video output on most server motherboards
- arminiusreturns 4y agoCan confirm, much of my high-compute architecture design work centered around heavy analysis and comparison of existing and promised backplanes. Especially when you throw images in the mix and need gpus, but you need the whole stack to be HC/HT or you hit bottlenecks later.
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago> One related issue is the death of integrated PCIe switches on motherboards. High-end boards used to have PCIe hubs on them so you could plugin in a lot of cards and still get all the bandwidth out of a 16-lane CPU. PCIe switches weren't common or necessary for most consumer applications. Workstation and server CPUs have plenty of lanes on their own. PCIe switches occupied a relatively narrow use case in the middle where people wanted to use consumer CPUs but attach a lot of add-in cards and share bandwidth across them. Even that use case has been eroded a bit with PCIe splitting options, where an x16 lane can be split into x8/x8 or even x4/x4/x4/x4 depending on the motherboard. An x4 PCIe 4.0 lane is as fast as an old x16 PCIe 2.0 lane, so that's a significant amount of bandwidth still. PCIe 5.0 takes this even further, where an x16 PCIe 5.0 slot has over 60GB/sec of bandwidth, which is a lot even when divided into x4 or x2 channels. AMD especially made platforms with a lot of PCIe lanes relatively affordable. An AMD workstation motherboard and CPU with a lot of PCIe lanes might not actually be that much more expensive than a hypothetical consumer CPU with a PCIe switch. The other issue is that with a PCIe switch is that you're still limited to upstream bandwidth, so if you need x16 bandwidth running to multiple cards at the same time, a PCIe switch doesn't actually help you.
- dsr_ 4y agoIt's a demand issue. Business users get: laptops, mostly. You need a desktop? It's either because you aren't trusted/don't need to take a laptop around or because you need a workstation. The low end doesn't need PCIe slots for anything: integrated GPUs are good enough to do all generic business work, integrated sound, network, blah blah blah. So we've identified workstations as the business case for more PCIe slots. The AMD workstation CPUs (ThreadRipper and EPYC-P)have lots and lots of PCIe lanes. More than that. The Intel workstation CPUs ... don't. G12 has 16xPCIe 5 and 4xPCIe 4. So you buy AMD this year. Home users: either you're a casual gamer or a hardcore gamer. Either way, you need a maximum of 2 PCIe slots for GPUs, and you're done. What's left? People on HN who run server and workstation tasks on repurposed desktop hardware, some of whom buy used server gear and live with the noise, some of whom buy AMD workstation gear
- Q6T46nT668w6i3m 4y agoThere’re plenty of uses that you may not see: I have a capture and sound card in addition to two GPUs.
- highwaylights 4y agoI'd be confident in saying that you're an outlier in that though.
- bentcorner 4y agoI have a PCIe sound card but I have to say these days that I'm actually using a tiny apple usb dongle for my audio, and it sounds cleaner than the internal sound card does. The dongle was also a fraction of the price of the sound card, and way more convenient.
- Silhouette 4y agoThat may be true but in an industry that produces millions of new computers every year there's quite a bit of room for outliers. After all someone has been buying all these specialised expansion cards for all these years. Graphics, sound and networking may have been the biggest reasons and may now be adequately catered for in everyday PCs without the extra hardware. However the high end of all of those markets still needs more than what you get on any basic motherboard and processor and then there are all the speciality cards as well catering for who knows how many niche markets.
- cbozeman 4y agoThis is interesting, but honestly a little pointless, and misses the real issue. I'll address it line-by-line. > Lack of USB ports My motherboard has 8 USB ports of varying capability on the rear I/O block. It has two internal headers to add another 8 USB ports. That's 16 ports. It's not even a very expensive or feature-rich motherboard... it's an MSI X570 Gaming Edge Wifi... $209.99 on release date at MicroCenter in 2019. > Thunderbolt ports so you can attach monitors, USB devices, and even externally-mounted PCIe cards with a single daisy-chainable cable Who exactly is doing this, when most video cards have 2 or 3 DisplayPort connectors on them...? External PCIe cards? For what purpose? > WiFi cards so you can get higher network speeds and lower latency without a cable 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? > Network cards so you can have additional and/or faster Ethernet ports 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) > TV tuners so you can receive, watch, and time-shift local over-the-air content This may be the single 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. > Video capture cards so you can stream or record video feeds from game consoles or non-USB cameras There are plenty of excellent USB devices to accomplish this, you don't need a PCI Express-based solution. > SATA or SAS adapters so you can attach additional hard drives and SATA SSDs Almost every motherboard, certainly every ATX motherboard of the past 10 years or so I've seen, has standard at least 6 SATA ports. Smaller ITX boards may only have 2 or 4, but if that's your design, you've already committed yourself to a lack of PCI Express slots. > M.2 adapters so you can attach additional NVME SSDs Most mid-range motherboards have at least two of these. High-end motherboards have up to 4. This still doesn't solve your primary problem that I'm going to address here in a moment. > Sound cards so you can run a home theater surround sound system from your PC without needing a receiver (RIP Windows Media Center) 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-5/7/9, but why? > Legacy adapters for older devices that use serial, parallel, or PCI (non-Express) to connect to the computer I'm not even sure what you'd attach that's that old... and more importantly, why... **** THE ACTUAL PROBLEM **** 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'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/PDIF), a 2.5 to 10 gig NIC, WiFi 6 or 6E, 8-12 USB ports including Type-A & Type-C, multiple M.2 slots (some motherboards support up to 5 now). Turn the clock back 20 years or so. Hell, go back to 1997, when the first WiFi router was sold. You'd have to buy your motherboard. You'd have to buy your NIC. You'd have to buy your WiFi card. You'd have to buy your sound card. That'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 on their rear I/O connectors alone. No. The problem is not "lack of PCI Express slots". 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're gonna buy a Samsung 990 Pro NVMe SSD (which is gonna use those 4 lanes), and will certainly saturate it with it's 1,600,000 IOPS and 8-9000 MB/s transfer rate. SLI and CrossFire are still supported technologies, even though, frankly, no one could afford to use them in the past two years, but that'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'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. No, the problem is lack of PCI Express lanes available. We thought AMD had rode to our rescue with Threadripper. 64 to 128 PCI Express lanes "ought to be enough for just about anybody". Enthusiasts bought Threadripper to easily run dual GPU setups and dual or quad NVMe setups. You didn't even have to "go nuts". You could pick up a Threadripper 2950X for it'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. No. The problem is not the lack of slots. The problem is the lack of lanes. We thought Lisa Su had rode to our rescue against Intel and their stingy horseshit antics, only to find out she's not only just as bad, she'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. But that is your real problem. The lack of PCI Express lanes. Not slots.