- Moderator
- #6,101
This is something I didn't even know was a thing to think about until recently
It's confusing at first but I find it helps narrow your selection of boards depending on your use case. For example I could immediately rule out all Gigabyte Aorus boards because after looking at their block diagrams it appears like they're aimed at streamers/creators. Those boards have lots of lane sharing from the storage to feed the extra USB ports and PCIe slots so you can run things like capture cards. ASRock have only just started appearing at Aussie retailers and so far I can only find two that list them (Scorptec and Centre Com) and before that I was deadset on the x870 Tomahawk. Being an x870 and not an x870e it has less lanes but it was the only board at that price where I could run two M2 drives at full speed without pulling lanes from anything else. With the x870e ASRock boards that will never be an issue if I plan on loading even more storage in the future.