PCI-e 5.0 SSD’s Have Hit The Market! Is It Worth The Upgrade?
One of the latest improvements to the current technology we take advantage of every day in our computers has been around for a while, but we are only now able to take advantage of it with PCI-e 5.0 NVME SSD’s being released onto the consumer market.
PCI-e 5.0 is supported on AMD 7000-series chips and on some systems running Intel’s 12th gen or 13th gen CPU’s. PCI-e 4.0 has a maximum bandwidth(rate of data transfer) of 64Gb/s where PCI-e 5.0 achieves 128Gb/s. That works out to 4Gb/s per PCI-e 5.0 lane, so with the standard 4x 5.0 lane that m.2 drives use, that’s 16Gb/s of bandwidth available to your shiny new PCI-e 5.0 SSD.
But do we need those crazy high speeds for storage? Well, the theoretical limit of the most common controllers used for PCI-e 5.0 SSD’s so far is 14gb/s sequential read and 11.8Gb’s sequential write. So for now that’s the hard limit of what 5.0 drives are capable of – which lines up nicely with the bandwidth of 4x PCI-e 5.0 lanes.
If you’ve seen any PCI-e 5.0 SSD’s, you’ll probably have seen the massive heat-piped passive heatsinks some of them come with or even active cooling which comes in the form of a smaller heatsink with a tiny fan that can only spin at one speed – full. The larger passive designs may prove challenging to build with, as they do make clearance an. There are also versions on the market with low profile passive heatsinks, which will be much easier to integrate into a build, in any case high-end and even some mid-range motherboards come with built in passive heatsinks, so you don’t really need to buy an SSD with a heatsink if that’s the case and you are worried about cooling.
To answer if you really do need a PCI-e 5.0 SSD, it’s hard to tell at this point. Direct Storage may end up being the greatest benefit of such high read/write speeds. However, with direct storage still being in it’s infancy – it is difficult to have a concrete answer. Direct storage is a Windows API that we have covered before, but in short it allows the GPU to load and decompress assets directly from your SSD, bypassing the CPU.
So far, we haven’t seen much performance improvement from PCI-e 4.0 and PCI-e 5.0 drives in the limited game titles that support direct storage currently. So it, again, remains to be seen where this side of the argument will fall.
At the moment you can expect to pay upwards of twice as much for a PCI-e 5.0 drive as compared to an equivalent PCI-e 4.0 SSD. So do your research and make an informed decision before taking the 5.0 plunge.
