How hard is choosing an x870e board?!? :D

[rtho782]

For obvious reasons I want to avoid ASrock. I'm on Gigabyte now and wouldn't mind a change.

I obviously have a GPU (currently 4090FE but might pick up a 5090). I have a Mellanox ConnectX-4 25GbE card, ideally x4 or x8, that I want to keep, so need a 2nd PCIe slot. Ideally, this will come from chipset so as not to limit PCIe for GPU.

I then have 3x PCIe 4.0 M.2 drives I plan to retain. I would like the boot drive on CPU, not as fussed with the other two.

All the x870e boards seem to waste their PCIe lanes on a billion type-c ports, and more m.2 than anyone knows what to do with (if I need more than my existing 20TB of m.2 I will use iSCSI to my server).

I'm honestly getting so frustrated looking for a board that I kind of just want to give up and hope that AM6 has more lanes!!

Any suggestions?

 

[ToOo]

The MsI Tomahawk seems to have decent pcie lane sharing.
Look at page 73 of the manual.
By my understanding the GPU lanes aren't shared, and if you disable the 40gbps USB then you can have 2 gen 5 SSD running from the cpu, plus another gen 4 drive running off chipset A, leaving you a 4x gen 4 pcie slot for your mellanox card running off chipset B.

 

[mickyflinn]

The Gigabyte X870E Aorus Elite WIFI7 has a
1 x PCI Express x16 slot, supporting PCIe 4.0 and running at x4 (PCIEX4)
* The PCIEX4 slot shares bandwidth with the M2D_SB connector. The PCIEX4 slot becomes unavailable when a device is installed in the M2D_SB connector.

This can be used for your card as long as you don't use that m2 slot from my understanding and is all related to the chipset.

Always check for confirmation.

Gigabyte X870E Aorus Elite WIFI7 (Socket AM5) DDR5 ATX Motherboard

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[rtho782]

Thanks both, will look at those!!!

 

[Si MPS]

Biggest issue I had at the time was finding a decent one that was in stock!

 

[Jimbo]

Ive also been considering buying a x870E motherboard but i just couldnt decide between them all. The Asus x870E-E came close though as i already own the B650E-E but considering id see almost zero difference I just didnt bother in the end.