In a similar vein, the £2.00 headphones I got (which are totally fine, btw). came with a 4" micro-USB cable for charging. I've plugged the micro USB bit into the headphones and secure the rest of the cable to the headband. In future when charging, I'll plug the other end into a port and never disturb the actual headphone socket ever again.
I also use 1M 4-gang extensions around the house that can be tucked under furniture and pulled out when needed. Which kills 2 birds with one stone :)
A motherboard costing a thousand, has a different connector mix.
For the ports that offer Thunderbolt or USB4, you must read up on the standards, to see what interfaces they use, and what they are good for. For example, I don't think USB4 is compatible with USB 1.1 keyboards, so running a USB-C to USB-A for a keyboard would not be a use case. But there are likely to be additional rules, so you need to Wiki that stuff before buying. I refer to these as the obscure standards, because it's going to be a learning experience.
I think Asmedia has had a USB4 chip for approximately one year, and it can be used to add USB4 to motherboards where the Southbridge does not have that standard.
Regular motherboards do not have the PCI Express lanes to support massive amounts of I/O properly. There is some sharing going on. Most of the time, you will not notice. For example, this is most likely to be apparent, when you are attempting a SoftRAID and a bunch of interfaces are all doing reads at the same time or a bunch of interfaces are all doing writes at the same time. It may spoil your benchmarking speeds.
The 285 can't even run a PCIE Rev5 NVMe at 14GB/sec. It can only run it at 12GB/sec, because some chip comms inside the CPU, have a die to die comms path that adds transmission latency, and the pipelining isn't good enough to hide it. "Even the simple things in life are not guaranteed". For those who must run at ungodly speeds.
USB-C *is* taking over, but the motherboard companies regularly survey what customers are doing, and they do not push interface mixes that won't get used. They know that customers look at the diagrams, like the one above, before purchasing, and thus, getting those details right, makes a difference to sales.
There are also add-on cards. For Thunderbolt. And for USB4. The ThunderBolt cards may have been vendor specific (Asus card with Asus mobo) and the motherboard may have a declaration of "ThunderBolt Ready". They put some cheesy control signals on a separate cable leading to the add-on card, which complicated the fitting of the card.
Paul
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