Wouldn't the slow ram also not help. I guess I just don't understand the point of triple channel memory, with slow ddr3.
Didn't it only support pcie 2.0? Also, side note: wouldn't you need an entire 16x PCIe slot's worth of bandwidth to feed a PCIe 4 SSD? I guess I don't understand how you would make an older board compatible with NVME.
Yes, I was referring to the slower memory. At the time DDR3 was the fastest available, triple channel better than dual channel. But then HEDT moved on to quad channel and stayed there until just recently with 6 and 8 channel options now available without needing server hardware.
Essentially adding channels lets you be more efficient. Instead of addressing to two, three, or four memory banks individually, you can do all of them with a single clock cycle. Now you can't always do that in practice so the theoretical maximum bandwidth is rarely achieved in practice.
PCIe is both a speed of data transfer and a physical connection. So no, you wouldn't be able to use an 16x slot to gain full speed with a PCIe 3.0 or 4.0 SSD without a fancy switch chip to handle the traffic with PCIe 4.0 4x on one end and PCIe 2.0 16x on the other. That would be prohibitively expensive.
Bandwidth aside, adding M.2 / NVMe is simply a matter of protocol, it still runs on PCIe. They simply rewrite the BIOS and design a board with the appropriate slot. PCIe 2.0 at 4x is still about 4 times faster than a SATA drive.