

Ask HN: When did PCIe support become such a confusing mess? - fr0styMatt2

I&#x27;ve been out of the PC building game for a few years and coming back into it to build my latest rig, oh boy....<p>What the hell is going on with product segmentation? It seems like there&#x27;s a confusing mass of very subtle differences between motherboards and processors that&#x27;s only spelled out in fine print.  Slots that only work in certain configurations if you don&#x27;t have too many drives or an M.2 card plugged in; no SLI support on motherboards that call themselves &#x27;Gamer&#x27; motherboards.  Confusing numbers wrt. to PCIe lanes on processors vs. chipsets.  Argh.<p>Is this some conspiracy to make things confusing? Or is there actually some logic behind this that I&#x27;m just missing? I&#x27;m looking at you Intel &amp; Nvidia....
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wmf
I don't know how long this has been going on (I mostly buy lower-end
motherboards that don't have weird limitations), but it seems like a natural
consequence of a specs-driven competitive market in motherboards built from
monopoly chipsets. If ASUS has four slots and Gigabyte has five[1][2][3]
slots, people are going to buy Gigabyte.

