is the number of PCIE lanes available determined by the chipset and the CPU? and if so, is it just those two or there other things?

only lanes offered by the cpu matter for snowblossom, the motherboard is mostly just a pci-e switch in this context

ok, thanks :slightly_smiling_face:

if considering AMD, it looks like it has to be a TR4 threadripper CPU for a lot of PCI-E lanes

pci-e 4.0 can change the game as then a high performance ssd would only need 2 lanes