I've got a somewhat similar issue as the OP. I'm interested in buying a one-port 10 GBe card (VMWare compatible).
My HPE ML30 Gen 9 has 4 PCIe 3.0 slots:
- One slot (x4) is already being used by an x4 NVMe card.
- Another slot (x16) is being used by an Nvidia GPU.
- Two slots are currently empty. These slots have "x1 bus width and x4 connector width".
I just wanted some clarification on using the x1 bus width and x4 connector width" slots:
When buying a PCIe 10 GBe NIC, I assume I can buy either an x1 or x4 NIC for these slots?
If I get an x4 card and put it in an "x1 bus width and x4 connector width"" slot, I assume it will work just fine, but its
performance will be throttled to an x1's performance (~ 8Gbps)?
I suppose the server and the switch will both believe that they are connected via 10 Gbpe connection, but in reality, performance testing will show it's less?
I suppose I can also get a PCIe 10 GBe x1 card (whose performance will also be throttled down to 8Gbps), but
since my empty slots are "x4 connector slots", I assume that I'm better off just getting an x4 card so that in the future, I'll have the flexibility to move it to an x4 slot (on same server or in another server).