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Originally Posted by
DanceswithUnix
I think these days if you care that much about PCIe lanes you are expected to go Threadripper.
It doesn't matter what sort of card you plug into the second slot, if you use the slot then half the lanes of the first slot get diverted to the second slot to make it work.
PCIe isn't a parallel bus like ISA or PCI, you get a fixed number of lanes which are then allocated between various slots and devices. Your current board uses Nvidia PCIe bridge chips to connect a pair of x16 slots to a single x16 out of the CPU, so the slots were physically x16 but actually shared bandwidth if you tried to access them at the same time and the bridge chip adds some extra latency. That and the expense of extra silicon, they kind of fell out of fashion.
I had a similar problem at work. I ended up with some Asus AMD board that got me a pair of x8 slots and a x4 slot which worked for my needs.