Ask HN: When did PCIe support become such a confusing mess?

1 points by fr0styMatt2 10 years ago | 1 comment

I've been out of the PC building game for a few years and coming back into it to build my latest rig, oh boy....

What the hell is going on with product segmentation? It seems like there's a confusing mass of very subtle differences between motherboards and processors that's only spelled out in fine print. Slots that only work in certain configurations if you don't have too many drives or an M.2 card plugged in; no SLI support on motherboards that call themselves 'Gamer' motherboards. Confusing numbers wrt. to PCIe lanes on processors vs. chipsets. Argh.

Is this some conspiracy to make things confusing? Or is there actually some logic behind this that I'm just missing? I'm looking at you Intel & Nvidia....

wmf 10 years ago |

I don't know how long this has been going on (I mostly buy lower-end motherboards that don't have weird limitations), but it seems like a natural consequence of a specs-driven competitive market in motherboards built from monopoly chipsets. If ASUS has four slots and Gigabyte has five[1][2][3] slots, people are going to buy Gigabyte.