Workstations are the way to go. There are a few motherboards out there that give you four 2x wide slots.
Pro tip: think in pcix3 terms, 16x lanes (pcix3) is a sought after baseline. 8x lanes often preform about 80% of 16x, often due other system limitations are the bottlenecks, not the pci bus.
Depending on cpu, motherboard chipset, and internal lane connections, you will struggle to find four 16x slots.
PCI 4.0 adds to the mess, but always in your benefit, just not as much as you might think Depending on the above.
Older cards 3.0
Most cards you consider modern good and better 4.0
New cards 5.0
4.0 lanes can be split by chipsets for things like nvme drives and usb. And is 2x the bandwidth of pcix3 with supported 4.0 devices. (8x pcix4 ~ 16x pcix3) A nice motherboard feature is when 16x pice4 lanes are split into two 16x pciex3 slots. Chipsets and nvme drives benefit greatly from pcix4 and often free up more pcix3 lanes for the slots.
So… if you find four pci double wide slots with at least 8x lanes per slot your leaving some performance ‘on the table’ but your really not that handicapped by the loss for what you buying, especially when shopping used.
Really new cards would suffer more from lane saturation, and may not have a favorable cost to benefit due to newer cards price.
Yes.
Workstations are the way to go. There are a few motherboards out there that give you four 2x wide slots.
Pro tip: think in pcix3 terms, 16x lanes (pcix3) is a sought after baseline. 8x lanes often preform about 80% of 16x, often due other system limitations are the bottlenecks, not the pci bus.
Depending on cpu, motherboard chipset, and internal lane connections, you will struggle to find four 16x slots.
PCI 4.0 adds to the mess, but always in your benefit, just not as much as you might think Depending on the above.
Older cards 3.0 Most cards you consider modern good and better 4.0 New cards 5.0
4.0 lanes can be split by chipsets for things like nvme drives and usb. And is 2x the bandwidth of pcix3 with supported 4.0 devices. (8x pcix4 ~ 16x pcix3) A nice motherboard feature is when 16x pice4 lanes are split into two 16x pciex3 slots. Chipsets and nvme drives benefit greatly from pcix4 and often free up more pcix3 lanes for the slots.
So… if you find four pci double wide slots with at least 8x lanes per slot your leaving some performance ‘on the table’ but your really not that handicapped by the loss for what you buying, especially when shopping used.
Really new cards would suffer more from lane saturation, and may not have a favorable cost to benefit due to newer cards price.