Comment by crote

For a lot of enthousiasts the problem genuinely is in the lane count.

For example, putting a cheap 2nd-hand dual 25G NIC in a DIY server is quite attractive. But those are using PCIe Gen3 - so unless you're giving it 8 lanes it is being bottlenecked.

Same on the storage side: that PCIe Gen4 x4 slot might technically have enough bandwidth for four SSDs in most storage applications, but the board doesn't support bifurcating it.

The total platform bandwidth is plenty, it just isn't available in the way I want to use it.