PCIe 5.0, Is It Worth It?

With 12th gen Intel CPUs supporting PCIe 5.0, and upcoming AMD CPUs to also have support, is it worth upgrading your hardware?

Benefits of PCIe 5.0

While graphics cards on their own do not use all the available bandwidth of PCIe gen 3.0 and 4.0, your motherboard PCIe bandwitdth is shared between the different lanes. So by having a CPU and motherboard with PCIe gen 5 support, your PC will benefit from:

• DDR5 RAM support
• Gen 5 NVMe SSD support
• Higher bandwidth for m.2 storage devices

Increased bandwidth is the most notable upgrade in higher generations of PCIe, where every new version gives approximately double the bandwidth compared to the previous generation.

What does higher bandwidth mean for PC performance?

Higher data bandwidth means that your storage devices can transfer data at much higher speeds, resulting in faster load times in games, and a faster operating system where launching programs and opening files is instant. As for graphics cards, higher bandwidth means faster graphics processing which results in less performance drops and faster rendering.

PCIe for gaming

Here are some reasons to upgrade to PCIe gen 5.0 for gaming:

• Ensures peak performance with support for high clocked DDR5 RAM and CPUs with higher core counts.
• M.2 Storage slots grant higher loading speeds, Intel’s 12th gen 600-seroes chips use DMI 4.0 which offers twice the speed of the previous generation.
• If your GPU is PCIe gen 4 or 5, you can achieve the full power that the card can provide.

Currently AMD’s new Ryzen 6000 series laptops support PCIe gen 5, but their desktop CPUs will only have support when they release their 7000 series later this year. Considering the cost of upgrading to a new motherboard, processor and RAM, it is best for you to wait until AMD releases their next gen CPUs rather than upgrade to Intel now. Judging from past releases of 3rd and 5th gen Ryzen, it is expected that AMD’s new processors will leave Intel in the dust.