I hate that consumer boards have numerous x1’s that likely go unused. I wish they would consolidate them to an x4. It was hard enough to find a decent board with 2 x16’s that could get split to 2 x8’s, since a lot of manufacturers want to split the second x16 to x4.
But with a 10gbe and HBA, the x8’s get used up. If your HBA uses 3.5 sata drives, you could adapt the card to an x1 spot and likely not suffer speed, freeing up the larger pci for this.