The GigE chip can be placed on the PCI bus just for "pennies" (meaning PCI NICs are still cheaper than PCI-E ones, probably offsetting the extra price the HDMI port brings to the board), there are still unused PCI-E lanes on the southbridge for that...It also means that the 16x PCIe slot is only 4x in actuality due to the lanes being used for the onboard HD outputs. I believe that the GigE chip is riding the PCI slow bus on that model, too.
But the bad thing is the PEG slot only being 4x... My guess is that, because the G33 northbridge doesn't support native HDMI output, some of the PCI-E lanes have to be rerouted to HDMI, which sucks, btw... It would have been much better to do as ASRock does, and put the HDMI port on an ADD2+ card, which the G33 northbridge accepts, and that would only reduce the PEG slot speed when the card was installed. I mean, the HDMI slot disables itself when a PEG card is used, right?
Cheers.
Miguel