Can anyone recommend a specific, well-made, high-performance motherboard with loads of PCIe lanes and expansion slots, and sensible lane topology?
All the motherboards these days make me feel claustrophobic. My current workstation is pretty old, but feels like it had more expansion capability (relative to its time) than what's on the market today.
Some builds I kept tabs on:
Let's Encrypt documented their early 2021 whitebox that used 128 PCIe 4.0 lanes, mainly for storage: https://letsencrypt.org/2021/01/21/next-gen-database-servers...
Troy Hunt (HaveIBeenPwned) recently solicited upgrade advice from the internet and settled on an Asus Pro WS TRX50-SAGE WIFI (which doesn't appear to be in the MoboMaps database yet): https://gist.github.com/troyhunt/a6e565981e4769976e9cffb705f...
Nice! One suggestion - please add AM4 socket boards. With current memory prices, AM5 with DDR5 is becoming unattainable for some. DDR4 prices are rising as well. But not nearly as bad as DDR5.
Whoa. This is so cool and helpful. Too bad my board is Intel. Is there a way to contribute to this?
I dropped a message to the creator :fingers_crossed: they open the motherboard database so we can make contributions
I wish all manufacturers clearly gave info like this up front. AM4 boards would be nice.
Yeah my ASRock have nice map of the every lane and interface and where they are connected on the board. Especially important as some devices go thru second io expander
For disclosure, this was created by "Ronin Wilde" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgdXj75VSMo
I found it useful and thought others might also like it.
I’ve been struggling to find an AM5 board that can run three MI50s at 4x. This is perfect thank you.
Him are you sure about some of the PCI slots? I think some marked as 4x get downgraded to 1x on these boards…
Further edit - this maybe accurate - how are you getting this / confirming it?
Wow, this is great! I don't know how they generate this but it's really impressive. One of the things that I've been surprised with is some older dual socket workstations have tons of PCI-E lanes, but none are hooked to the second CPU it seems
Very nice! Just a note (as the site says on bottom left side), this can vary depending on the CPU you use, would be nice to be able to select all different variations of supported CPUs as a future feature.
How can I contribute the data for the boards I own which are not on the site?
That is so incredibly useful, hardware vendors do such a bad job of properly advertising how many GPUs will actually work and with what combination of m.2 slots in use.
Warning: addicting site :)
Legendary!