On Friday, December 20, 2019 at 11:55:23 PM UTC+8, Paul wrote:

I could also find GT710 cards with the full x16 connector
and 16 pairs of caps and so on. But the video card
was "off-brand" and presumably this was part of
their marketing drive to snag consumers who thought
the extra window-dressing made a difference. Chopping
off half the wiring on a gutless card like this, makes
no difference at all. It could likely work just as
well with an x4 wiring plan. (Of course the marketing
department would kill the engineer for messing up
their marketing message if that happened. As soon as
consumers see the x4 wiring, they know it's a loser.)


Could be for server mainboards that often have a heap of x4 slots for fibre
channel, fast ethernet etc. And you want to put in a graphics card that is
a little bit better than the onboard VGA. Although that would be a pretty
small market. I can't think of an AMD x4 graphics card off the top of my head.