Is is just me or do the options out there coming from gigabyte and asrock rack look sad when it comes to am5?
I mean im good with mATX but only 2 pcie slots? wtf
i think at minimum there should be three x16 electrical slots that are pcie 4.0
(and yes they should all allow bifurcation)
The CPU only has 28 PCIe lanes, so what do you expect to get from extra slots?
Plx gen 5 to 4
Would love to see it, but PCIe switch chips are pretty spendy and you don’t usually see them on consumer motherboards.
Does x670e unlock a few more pcie lanes(or does it have a PLX), b/c looking at them compared to B650 they have more pcie and m.2
They use multiple B650 chipsets in series for more connectivity, but in the end it’s 4 lanes of PCIe 4.0 back to the CPU shared between all those devices. Depending on your use case, that may or may not be OK.
Asrock rack is not consumer
Then again, what do you need those PCIe slots for?
NIC, you have the 2x10GBe on the server board. The PCIe bus will have trouble saturating those unless you populate the x16 slot.
Drives, you have the 4x that is more than sufficient for SATA RAID, and m.2 storage is not for this price tier in any case.
The 7950X come with an iGPU that can handle decent video decoding, so unless you want to do heavy GPU workloads, a GPU is not required either.
Bottom line, for SOHO these boards are more than adequate for most tasks. YMMV though.
I dont opt for the 10GbE board…(I’d rather have SFP+)
I’d rather have the pcie slots for either storage or gpu or SFP+ cards, flexible for the future.
Then go for Threadripper / EPYC / Xeon, consumer boards are way too pleb for your needs 
I do agree that it is nice to have options, and I would like a few more m.2 myself - But the way the future looks like m.2 will be for internal connectors and/or direct storage (SSDs), while traditional PCIe will be for (mostly) external connectors.
Well am5 is not really targeted towards servers.
So it is of course obvious that there won´t be many option available ¨if¨ any.
they priced themselves into a different price bracket with threadripper pro and epyc…
I also dont want to be forced over to only use EATX and cases for EATX
Ive thought about it several times, but cant do it.
I guess i should start looking for plx card options…
Alternatively you could ditch the ECC requirement and go with something like B650E Aorus Master.
… Naaaah, that’s heresy.
Take this example.
it already has a x16, a x4 slot, (2) x1 slots and with the (two) M.2s.
The MBs targeted to home lab ppl could easily have a x16 and (3) x4 slots
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I guess i could find some of these and do withOUT IPMI (or get a pikvm)
I just did the WS x570 ACE route with a PiKVM. Working great for me , this motherboard as an upgrade for me stability seems better as well. Have only used Windows on it though.
I use Infiniband to an NVMe array in the x8 slot. Crystal disk (etc) mark will max out the bus. That slot running through the chipset doesn’t seem to be holding me back in the real world. Maybe 1/3rd of the way to HEDT but with a lot of single core speed.
I had the same idea but when tried to use the iGPU it came with a significant heat penalty. Did anyone else run into this? Were you able to solve it with beefed-up cooling? I have just a corsair 280 AIO with push/pull maglev fans, nothing special.
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