An HDB8228 HDEC Series midsize backplane delivers more bandwidth with lower data latencies between an HDEC Series system host board and up to eight (8) industry standard, commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS), PCI Express plug-in cards. This unique midsize backplane design eliminates expensive PCI Express switches and makes full use of the eighty (80) native lanes of Gen3 PCI Express from the dual Intel® Xeon® E5-2600 v3 series processors on an HEP8225 HDEC Series system host board.