PCIe lanes?

[Watashi]

Are PCIe lanes just the physical connectors that RAM and GPU's sit in?

[Electronics Wizardy]

Ram doesn't use pcie.

 

Pcie is also used for thing like usb 3, some sata ports, network ports, wifi, thunderbolt, m.2 ssds.

[79wjd]

PCIE lanes are wires running from the CPU to the PCIE Slots and the chipset. The slots are the physical connectors. Lanes are the physical wires. 

[Wolther]

They allow things to communicate with the CPU directly, and yeah they are connected by wires leading to the cpu 

[MegaDave91]

You are referring to DIMM (for RAM) & PCIe SLOTS (for PCIe based cards).

 

DIMM:

 

PCIe (bottom is PCI):

[Aniallation]

Technically yes, but just because a slot has a certain amount of lanes doesn't mean you can utilize them all at once. For example your uppermost slot might be 16 lanes but in SLI mode you'll only be able to use 8 of them.