I have an extra PCIe USB card I can use for Virtual machine pass through (sometimes it's useful to be able to pass the entire controller instead of just a device).
I have an XTRX software defined radio.
I have an extra SATA/SAS HBA.
One day I'd love to get a rubidium timecard.
I have a Hauppage TV tuner card that I use to get OTA TV and record certain shows. I'm pretty sure there are USB solutions, but if I remember, at the time I got this it was one of the only cards that my system supported or whatever caveat I was operating around.
This is a really interesting question. I remember a lot of very niche PCI (not PCIe) cards from the old days.
My current-day boring use-case: Multiple GPUs that have never once been used for gaming. One is an A2000 card that does video transcoding and tone mapping for Jellyfin. The other is an old Quadro card that handles encoding/decoding for my NVR.
You can use a SAS controller or 10G ethernet card in the 16X slots. If your motherboard support PCIe bifurcation, you can get an adapter card to use 4 NVMe drives in a 16X slot. You can get controller cards for older interfaces like firewire, serial, and parallel that will use a 1X slot.
I use them for additional network adaptors in one host.
In another I use them for NVMe adaptors for an ancient MB that predates the existence of the m.2 interface.
MSI GeForce RTX 4090 SUPRIM LIQUID X
Additionally, I had a 3 port FireWire card that I used for digitizing old MiniDV camcorder cassettes. But I had to remove it because someone fucked something up in kernel 6.5, crashing the whole boot process after a few milliseconds.
PCI is not the same as PCIe
For me I use a GPU and a Sata card (both passed though to different VMs)
Wifi card. Well, I don't really use it but it is plugged in.
I have a 6700xt for Linux and an old 2070 that I pass through to a windows guest. I might get a usb card too to pass through but not sure if I have any more space in my mid tower for another pci card.
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