Hardware

Most people use hardware every day without knowing what is actually happening inside the box.

That is fine right up until you are buying a motherboard, building a homelab, adding a second GPU, or wondering why your second NVMe slot seems slower. Then it matters.

This section covers the PCIe bus — the backbone that almost everything inside your machine connects through — and the misconceptions that follow people around for years.

In This Section

• PCIe Fundamentals — what lanes are, how they attach to the CPU, and why not all M.2 slots are equal.
• PCIe Generations — Gen 1 through Gen 5, what each generation actually means in bandwidth numbers, and when the upgrade matters.
• PCIe Devices — how GPUs, NICs, capture cards, and storage controllers share and consume lanes.
• USB Over PCIe — USB is not its own bus. It rides PCIe internally, and that has practical consequences.
• Common Misconceptions — the five things most people have wrong about PCIe.
• Builds — real hardware configurations with PCIe topology, constraints, and use cases documented per machine.
• Raspberry Pi — Pi-specific infrastructure guides now grouped under Hardware.

Suggested Reading Order

Start with PCIe Fundamentals to get the mental model right. Generations and Devices build on that. USB Over PCIe is the most surprising section for most people. Read Misconceptions last — it will make more sense once the fundamentals are in place. The Builds section applies everything to real machines.