i thought my post was already too long to include this, but to your point, you can run AI inference in this setup and the performance can be pretty good.
I appreciate you making the post not about AI.
Yeah it is obviously actually useful for AI inference over which the pcie speed isn't particularly important and a single board computer gets you a small system.
There are definitely some use cases where it works out, others where it doesn't; I spent a bit of time testing that side of things late last year: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/big-gpus-dont-need-bi...