[reginald78]

Great info in this post with some uncommon questions answered. I have a 3060 with unimpressive idle power consumption, interesting that it varies so much.

I know it would increase the idle power consumption, but have you considered a server platform instead of Ryzen to get more lanes?

Even so, you could probably get at least 4x for 4 cards without getting to crazy. 2 m.2 -> pcie adapters, the main GPU slot and the fairly common 4x wired secondary slot.

Splitting the main 16x GPU slot is possible but whenever I looked into this I kind of found the same thing you did. In addition to being a cabling/mounting nightmare the necessary hardware started to eat up enough total system cost that just ponying up for a 3090 started to make more sense.