News Gigabyte Z590 Aorus Tachyon motherboard available shortly

That slot layout is terrible.

 

I guess click to enlarge is like the Portal cake?

 

Agree. Must be due to the 3x M2, in which is overkill. Why would you even need more than 2?

 

I can think of a situation I'd want three (work related) but I don't know if any board supports NVMe RAID5, so it's a moot point anyway. I'd rather they put them on the back, to be honest, even if it does make replacing them a bit more of a faff. The primary reason I dislike the slot layout is that as soon as you put a GPU in, you lose two slots... because what high-end modern GPU is single slot? Dual GPU? All PCI-E expansion gone. Unless they've done something very unusual and the primary slots are actually the 2nd and 4th slots (from the top in the publicity shot)... but I don't think that very likely.

 

But in those situations you'd probably also be looking at a HEDT board with plenty of real PCIe lanes (So you can stuff said m.2 drives into PCIe adapter cards).

 

Isn't the idea of a board with this number of power phases that you really ought to go with a custom loop, so single-slot GPUs are fine?

 

Then Gigabyte should have taken a look at their own cards:
https://www.gigabyte.com/Graphics-Card/GV-N3090AORUSX-WB-24GD#kf

 

In an ideal world, where I don't have to choose between two systems (and the ability to do two things at once) or one (and have people complaining at me when I explain that their work is in the queue) I would agree.

That said, any board like that, I'll be too busy stuffing GPUs in to worry about (or fit!) a PCI-E NVMe expansion card.

...

The only semi-reasonable single-slot GPU I can think of right now is a Quadro RTX 4000 - there was also a single slot GTX 1070 and it's Quadro equivalent, but even when new finding one was... not easy. The Quadros are fairly easy to find, but they're workstation GPUs so you don't half pay for the pleasure.