Apologies for not being clear - that was the impersonal "you", meaning "people in general". And i think it's correct in the general case, because both ATX and ITX point the extra bulk towards the edge of the mobo.
I have never seen a server board that offers 8x 16 lane slots. Being stuck with 7 slots means if I want an even 8 GPUs, I'd need to bifurcate one slot into x8 x8, which sacrifices a precious PCIe4 bandwidth.
On the chassis side, not having 8 slots means not supporting 4 GPUs internally, which sucks for certain workstation setups. Being that I actually do have 8x GPUs, I've had to settle for a jank mining rig for a chassis.
wait what? are you saying there are no 8-GPU motherboards period? Not 8 in ATXish form factor? There are plenty of those if you don't mind enterprise prices(or cryptomining reliability and performance if you're going for that)
It's not the pricing that bothers me, it's the inflexibility of using fully-integrated vendors like Dell/HP over custom, vs standards compliant vendors like Supermicro/ASRock. The difference for me lies in the ability to use chassis, power supplies, etc of my choosing, and not have to pay ongoing license fees for access to the BMC.
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Please don't tell me what I need. Real 8 slots would have saved me from having to bifurcate slot 7 in my 8 GPU AI rig.
Apologies for not being clear - that was the impersonal "you", meaning "people in general". And i think it's correct in the general case, because both ATX and ITX point the extra bulk towards the edge of the mobo.
Why was it not the case for you? Server layout?
I have never seen a server board that offers 8x 16 lane slots. Being stuck with 7 slots means if I want an even 8 GPUs, I'd need to bifurcate one slot into x8 x8, which sacrifices a precious PCIe4 bandwidth.
On the chassis side, not having 8 slots means not supporting 4 GPUs internally, which sucks for certain workstation setups. Being that I actually do have 8x GPUs, I've had to settle for a jank mining rig for a chassis.
wait what? are you saying there are no 8-GPU motherboards period? Not 8 in ATXish form factor? There are plenty of those if you don't mind enterprise prices(or cryptomining reliability and performance if you're going for that)
It's not the pricing that bothers me, it's the inflexibility of using fully-integrated vendors like Dell/HP over custom, vs standards compliant vendors like Supermicro/ASRock. The difference for me lies in the ability to use chassis, power supplies, etc of my choosing, and not have to pay ongoing license fees for access to the BMC.