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

  • 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.