Toliman

This was one of my main considerations for switching to Z890 boards for a server, specifically the Gigabyte Z890 AI TOP motherboard- as it could run both 8x SATA , a GPU at 8x PCIe, and a broadcom LSI 9300 16i at 8x in a 16x slot. And it had 10GBe as well. As you noted - the M.2 slots tend to occupy 4x PCIe lanes, so the slot ends up being shared/bifurcated with the PCI slot , network interface or Thunderbolt/USB4 port. Running a RX 9070 XT or RTX 5080 in PCIe Gen5 x8 is something people have tested - it does not affect FPS much, just loading times for assets. For the AM5 boards, x16 and x8/x8 SLI does require the 9000 series chips - which is where the x3D option is going to be a huge performance gain vs the standard Zen5 CPUs. The ROG crosshair X870 Hero was on my shortlist for a while, along with the Asrock X870E Taichi, the Gigabyte B850 AI Top Gigabyte X870E Aorus Master, which I ended up scratching off and not using. same with the Biostar X870E Valkyrie, which I couldn't find in stores and the MEG GODLIKE, which was a no-go. There's also the 2 creator boards, the Asrock X870 Taichi Creator and the Asus Proart X870E Creator with x8/x8 I ended up trying to google the results as a lot of mainboards had 2 x16 slots, but the 2nd slot was often shared with the M.2 or Thunderbolt connection, and the Asrock boards weren't available. One of the motherboards I first looked at, had 3 x16 slots, but were configured for x16, x4 and x1. In the end, I ended up fact-checking with Gemini/Grok AI, as I was hitting a lot of dead ends on available motherboards for the X870 chipset. Now that the X870E's are available - or at least not sold out/arriving soon, there's more options.