[elevation]

Even with a Threadripper you're at the mercy of the motherboard design.

I use ROG board that has 4 PCIe slots. While each can physically seat an x16 card, only one of them has 16 lanes -- the rest are x4. I had to demote my GPU to a slower slot in order to get full throughput from my 100GbE card. All this despite having a CPU with 64 lanes available.

[grw_]

I don't think Threadripper platform is to blame that you bought a board with potentially the worst possible pcie lane routing. Latest generation has 88 usable lanes at minimum, most boards have 4x 16x, and Pro supports 7x Gen 5.0 x16 links, an absolutely insane amount of IO. "At the mercy of motherboard design"- do the absolute minimum amount of research and pick any other board?

[nrdvana]

You're using 100GbE ... in an end-user PC? What would you even saturate that with?

[aaronmdjones]

I wouldn't think it's about saturating it during normal use; rather, simply exceeding 40 Gbit/s, which is very possible with solid-state NASes.

[Dylan16807]

Okay, but then I need to ask what kind of use case doesn't mind the extra latency from ethernet but does care about the difference between 40Gbps and 70Gbps.