no firmware related stuff but on i7 box i see this

Code:

[    3.784158] ixgbe: Intel(R) 10 Gigabit PCI Express Network Driver - version 5.1.0-k
[    3.784159] ixgbe: Copyright (c) 1999-2016 Intel Corporation.
[    4.460945] ixgbe 0000:02:00.0: Multiqueue Enabled: Rx Queue count = 4, Tx Queue count = 4 XDP Queue count = 0
[    4.559030] ixgbe 0000:02:00.0: 4.000 Gb/s available PCIe bandwidth, limited by 5 GT/s x1 link at 0000:00:05.0 (capable of 31.504 Gb/s with 8 GT/s x4 link)
[    4.670873] ixgbe 0000:02:00.0: MAC: 4, PHY: 0, PBA No: -
[    4.830343] ixgbe 0000:02:00.0: Intel(R) 10 Gigabit Network Connection
[    4.830387] libphy: ixgbe-mdio: probed
[    5.512853] ixgbe 0000:02:00.1: Multiqueue Enabled: Rx Queue count = 4, Tx Queue count = 4 XDP Queue count = 0
[    5.611006] ixgbe 0000:02:00.1: 4.000 Gb/s available PCIe bandwidth, limited by 5 GT/s x1 link at 0000:00:05.0 (capable of 31.504 Gb/s with 8 GT/s x4 link)
[    5.722787] ixgbe 0000:02:00.1: MAC: 4, PHY: 0, PBA No: -
[    5.882245] ixgbe 0000:02:00.1: Intel(R) 10 Gigabit Network Connection
[    5.882292] libphy: ixgbe-mdio: probed

does it say it sits on x1 not x4?
because on EPYC box it says this:

Code:

[    2.364368] ixgbe 0000:62:00.0: 32.000 Gb/s available PCIe bandwidth (5 GT/s x8 link)

kernel driver version matches, all other messages match too... strange, i thought this slot is x8, as manual states but then again i have 6 sata devices, full x16 gpu and both PCI slots used so that's probably all the lanes CPU has... you gave me an idea, thanks.
i guess i'll just pull it out later and try any of my other boxes and see if they report it differently under livecd deb 10.
i don't know how CPUs handle the lane selection but i guess if i have x16 card then x16 it would be unless it needs to be balanced out. this particular cpu is i7 860, with 16 lanes max, so if GPU is downgraded to x8, the rest goes to sata devices and two pci(legacy) devices(1gigabit lan and sound card).
there's no way it would be given x4 bandwidth by the cpu right. thanks, i will try it but i guess i'll have to suck it up and bear with it on 4gbit which would be a rather good result huh.


i guess there's really no way i can solve this and there's no better CPU for this socket so this would just never work on full speed unless i can get rid of some drives which isn't really possible. thanks intel for making such low-lane cpus. take amd, this box has 128 lanes with lot of them used by a bunch of nvmes and other stuff and i can plug in as much as physically possible and it would still have room for more in this case.