ATX AM4 mobo PCIe slot layout & tripple-slot GPUs - few options, none for B550

Are mobo vendors blind to the market?

i’m typing this at Complainistan local time RANT:30

Why are there so many options/mobos that have at least 1 PCIe x1 slot in the BLOCKED space occupied by huge honking heat sinks of GPUs!? Who thought that’d be a great idea!?

Why are there only a sparse few with a x1 slot above/north of the big and important x16 slot!?

I’m talking about mobos with at least 5 PCIe sockets - usually 1 big x16 for the GPU, and 4 x1.

Of course, there are less desirable PCIe Gen3 options with X370 and X450 chipsets.

When it comes to PCIe Gen4:

  • there’s NOTHING in the B550 category! (Or did i miss a memo?)

  • ASUS Prime X570-P (~160€$, is fairly expensive)

  • Biostar Racing X570GT8 (~230€$ LOL, and out of stock in DE/EU)

Am i complaining too early?
Is there a socket/slot layout that actually makes sense, in some vendors pre-production pipeline?

To whom should i complain about that? Probably not the technical support contact, right? Their marketing department? Who maintains a weighted list of feature requests?

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Why are there only a sparse few with a x1 slot above/north of the big and important x16 slot!?

It’s hard to route, the x 16 is coming direct from the cpu, and the x1 off the chipset, meaning the signal lines have to cross if you want to do that. Possible but tricky with gen 3. Gen 4 pci-e is finicky enough without doing anything fancy.

Also a lot of the ATX boards put the main x16 on slot 2 to improve cooler compatibility and potentially squeeze an m.2 in there. ATX has 7 slots, kill one for cooler compatibility and kill one for the standard dual slot gpu… If you want to get 4 more slots in there are only 4 placees you can put them.

The solution may be to find a pci-e extension/riser cable and hope it doesn’t interfere with the triple slot card too badly.

Gone are the days of multiple expansion cards. Unless you are running a low end single slot card, most of the time at the very least the two top most slots are used up by the GPU. You generally don’t want anything in the slot immediate the GPU either, since that will hinder airflow. The only sensible options left are the two bottom most slots. This is why I always look for boards with a bottom full length PCIe slot (even if it’s electrically a x4) so that I can accommodate any expansion card I may want to put there. And yes, many board makers are simply retarded when it comes to designing sensible PCIe expansion slot layouts. It’s like they assume users only run GPUs (most do but still).
These days you either get a board with everything you need/want integrated or one with plenty of high speed USB options so you could at least opt for USB devices for expansion (not always an ideal solution).

Well if you want to run a triple gpu setup on x570.
Then there are no really many options on the cheap.

The Msi MEG X570 Godlike with additional onboard pci-e switches comes to mind.
But yeah… $$$$

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