Andreas,

the statement about MorphOS should has contained a "not", sorry.

And as I've been using Hitachi components since the HD6309 was introduced, I'm fully aware of how Renesas evolved.

In any case, was I wrong in stating that they own Hatachi and NEC's electronics IP?
Or did you misinterpret my statement about NEC to mean any other part other than their electronics division (the only division I have any interest in).

In any case, could we get back to the subject at hand?

Raptor's specifications state that there are two USB 2.0 connectors on the Talos II Lite case.

I haven't found a device that can properly break an X8 PCI-E slot into X4 slots (or what I would prefer, 1 X4 and 4 X1 slots).
But I have found a company that has an X4 host interface that will properly connect to four seperate X1 slots.
And there are other devices, but I need to figure out if PLX switching is required, or if the lanes can simply be separated via routing.

In any case, since the Talos II supports sound output via hdmi on Radeon HD video cards, a sound card isn't actually required.
There are two front panel USB 2.0 connectors on the Talos II Lite chassis, and those could be expanded with hubs, or as Kronos has suggest the USB 3.0 connections could be used.
Networking? Well, there are two Broadcom Gigabit ethernet ports on board, so instead on resorting to a card with an currently supported network interface, it might just make more sense to put in the effort to create a native NIC driver.

So, I'm not sure I'd even need to use the X8 PCI-E slot, and if additional expansion is required, it ought to be possible to and hardware to the X8 slot that expands it to provide the connectivity for X1 sound, network, and USB 2.0 cards.