Officially z170 chipsets have total 20 PCI-E 3.0 lanes, and it is shown as 1x16 OR 2x8 or 1x8 + 2x4.
So it seems like if I insert one 16x PCI-E device (e.g. graphics card) I won't be able to use the rest of the lanes (one 4x speed PCI-E lanes). 20-16=4 PCI-E lanes wasted?
I have one 16x graphics card and one 1x speed sound card in my PC at this moment, so how does that work out? Is my graphics card working at 8x speed and sound card 1x speed or is it like 16x + 1x like it mathematically should be?
2nd Question is what happens to the speed of the PCI-E ports if the configuration now changes to one 16x graphics card+ one 4x m.2 ssd? Or what happens if one 16x graphics card+ one 4x ssd + one 1x sound card?
3rd Question and this is not important because I will probably never buy a PCI sound card, how do things play out if a PCI sound card or LAN card come into the equation?
I didn't actually find any proper answers to these questions in other sites.
Note: My hardware is Asus z170-p ddr4