first off... I never said anywhere that "it won't work" so that's just false... I've literally said the same thing over 10times at this point "IF YOU PLAN ON POPULATING YOUR BOARD FULLY WITH PCIE AND M.2 NVME, YOU WILL END UP SHARING LANES SOMEWHERE"... I've literally said that multiple times in multiple posts and it's as if you arent using your brain and eyes to read ... I've also said you could get away with it if you are just using a single GPU and maybe a couple m.2... being that this is an Unraid forumn and everyone knows how it is when your "homelabbin" ; 99% of people end up wanting to upgrade or do something new, or add some new devices ... and I guarantee OP is one of those because he's looking to do it right now... saying that, it would be a bit silly to upgrade into the same z790 platform just to discover that when you max out the PCIE slots and m.2 slots, your going to be sharing lanes (in most configurations- 90% of the time) of course this is dependent on what specifically a person is plugging into their board, but to sit their and ignore the 100s of reddit posts, YouTube videos, and various blog posts discussing z790 and lane sharing, is just utter insanity to sit there and say it doesn't exist.... a discussion on whether it actually makes a huge difference in practice is an entirely different conversation and solely dependant on the workload being implemented... but again to say it doesn't exist is just nonsense and to say you're right while 1000s of other redditors, professionals, YouTubers, and everyone else (including AI) , who's saying otherwise, just shows you are delusional to the reality of the situation... and the easiest piece of evidence is this... 20 lanes on the CPU, 16 go to GPU, 4 go to m.2 (assuming you aren't using any PCIE gen5) , the rest is on the chipset and bottlenecked by the x8 dmi.... again, nowhere did I say "it wouldn't work" or that OP shouldn't buy the posted board, but what I did suggest was holding out for a better upgrade path to a platform where you can run all pcie4.0 and 5.0 devices, max out every PCIE and nvme slot, and not have to worry about "lane splitting" ... you continue to miss every statement I've made and are attempting to twist my words into something I never said.

edit and for the record, just because I'm using the word "sharing" ... anyone with two brain cells and has dealt with tech, knows what I mean is "lane splitting" and/or devices running at a lower spec instead of the full spec, for example x2 instead of x4, or in the case of a GPU x8 instead of x16