Question Just seeking 2nd opinions -- to make sure I can do what I want to do

[BonzaiDuck]

First, keep in mind I have a reasonable degree of laziness. Hold that thought.

In other recent threads I've discussed a "Media PC" and movie-Jukebox connected to my HT Receiver and Sony Bravia. A movie and music jukebox!

To host the ISO, AVI, WMV etc. files, I have a 12TB, 4-disk drive-pool, connected to an 8-port SuperMicro SATA controller. The controller gold-plated slot connector is simply an 8-lane PCIE. I had put it in the first PCIE motherboard slot, where ordinarily one uses a graphics card -- a slot, by itself, that offers 16x PCIE Lanes. Another slot -- also 16x in size, provides 8 lanes in combination with the first slot.

I had originally used the onboard Intel graphics or iGPU. I have acquired an inexpensive nVidia graphics card. I might have thought to move the HDD controller to the second slot. But I'm thinking I could just put the dGPU in the second slot and leave the drive controller alone.

Does this seem "feasible"? Does it seem "reasonable"? The "jukebox" feeds mostly HD content, but could include some UHD material. My understanding of graphics cards -- particularly earlier generations (this is a 2020 Ampere card) -- is that they don't suffer too much in performance from loss of half the PCIE lanes in situations I mentioned. And if someone were to do SLI or Crossfire, I think the same motherboard limitations apply.

 

[coercitiv]

Put the card in the slot that it's convenient to mount to. With 8 lanes it has plenty of bandwidth, I bet it could work with 4 as well (for media, not games). Moreover, there's a very high chance that once you populate both slots, even the main one will operate at 8x instead of 16x. (you'll have to check mobo specs to make sure)

To illustrate what I'm referring to, here's an example from the Asus Sabertooth Z170 S in your signature:

 

[Quintessa]

My understanding of graphics cards -- particularly earlier generations (this is a 2020 Ampere card) -- is that they don't suffer too much in performance from loss of half the PCIE lanes in situations I mentioned

That understanding is correct for most gaming and desktop scenarios. Expect negligible difference for single-GPU gaming at typical resolutions. CPU-bound workloads or very heavy PCIe-GPU-GPU transfers (GPU compute, workstation IO) can show larger gaps, but for a media PC and gaming the x8 hit is minor.