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Motherboards with two x8 slots (alien.top)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hi Homelab community, After spending lot of time on unraid and homelab subreddits, I finally decided to host a NAS and started purchasing hardware. I bought 8 x 8tb drives(6+2parity drive+ 2 spares) but having trouble finding a motherboards which support 2 pcie x8 cards. All the boards I am checking on Newegg have 1 x16, 1 x4(mechanically x16), couple of x1(some boards have mechanically x16 slots but electrically 3+ slots are x1) Seems like I am missing something as I couldn’t be the first person who is looking to use 2 pcie slots. I want to use an HBA card (requires one x8 slot) and dual 10gbps nic (requires one x8 slot)

I am open to AMD/Intel though leaning more on Intel due to qsv i5-12600k + LGA 1700 motherboard Or 7600 + AM5 motherboard

Any help would be appreciated

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Seems like I am missing something

Yep, consumers CPU have very limited PCI lanes 16-24, the main slots (common usage graphic card ) is x16, then the cpu only have 8x lines for the rest of the stuff. Sometimes NVME or extra sata port usa some of that lines

No matter how many slots the MB have, they going to have 4 or 6 lines for the rest of the slots. Normally when there is a extra x16 is x4 only.

The best choice with consumer grade cpu/mb probably is buy a MB that support bifurcation in the main/16x slots. Probably not going to be cheap.

Then probably you going to have problems if you want connect in the future a 10gb card too, if you are planning that check used Xeon/MB normally have plenty of pci lanes (check intel ark)