PCIe 5.0 is nearly four years old and it's still virtually worthless in gaming PCs

HardwarePCIe 5.0 is nearly four years old and it’s still virtually worthless in gaming PCsWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: Asus)

A collage of Asus motherboards, against a purple gradient background

Nick Evanson, Hardware writer

(Image credit: Future)

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For a computer to support PCIe 5.0, it needs one of two things, though preferably both. First up is the CPU—all of the latest generation of processors from AMD and Intel have PCIe 5.0 controllers built into them.Ryzen 7000-serieschips have 28 lanes of Gen 5 PCIe that are split so that the first 16 are allocated to the graphics card slot, eight are dedicated to M.2 NVMe slots, and the remaining four are used to communicate with the motherboard chipset (more on that obfuscating mess in a moment).

Intel’s14th Gen Coreprocessors have the same number of lanes as AMD, but it’s all split quite differently. Only sixteen of them are PCIe 5.0 and the rest are the slower 4.0 spec; however, eight lanes are used for the motherboard chipset, leaving scope for a single SSD to be connected directly to the CPU. Well, not quite, as the 16 Gen 5 lanes can be switched into an 8+8 mode, half for the graphics card and half for SSDs (AMD’s chips can also do this).

Still, on paper, AMD has Intel thoroughly beat when it comes to PCIe 5.0 support. However, things become more complicated withRyzenprocessors because to access the full range of Gen 5 lanes, you need a motherboard that usesE-versions of the latest chipsets. For example, an X670 board will have a PCIe 4.0 graphics card slot and no more than a single PCIe 5.0 SSD slot. Switch to an X670E motherboard and the GPU slot will be 5.0 and there could be two Gen 5 M.2 slots (though it’s usually just the one).

AMD’s chips have lots of PCIe 5 lanes on offer but using them all is another matter.(Image credit: Future)

AMD Zen 4 CPU

If that’s a tad confusing, then I can assure you, it’s a better state of affairs than Intel’s current PCIe 5.0 support. Take theASRock Z790 Novamotherboard, as an example. It’s a lovely board, well built, and has a total of six M.2 SSDs. Two of these are directly wired to the CPU, for the best performance, and the one closest to the processor supports a PCIe 5.0 SSD. Unfortunately, if you putanySSD into that slot, the CPU automatically switches the graphics card slot to eight lanes (aka PCIe x8).

But it’s not just the SSD slots that Intel makes a mess of. A single PCIe 5.0 lane has a bandwidth of just under 4 GB/s, so eight of them aggregate to a total of 31.5 GB/s (let’s just call it 32). That’s the same as 16 lanes of Gen 4 so, in theory, putting a Gen 5 graphics card into an eight-lane slot shouldn’t be a problem.

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Except there aren’t any Gen 5 graphics cards—they’re all still using PCIe 4.0, at best. The next round of new GPUs from AMD, Intel, and Nvidia may move to the newer spec but given that they’ve only just changed to Gen 4 in their latest generation of cards, there’s a good chance that they won’t.

A block diagram for an Intel Z790 motherboard chipset, with a 14th Gen desktop CPU

So, if you’re like me, and have that ASRock Z790 motherboard, no matter what GPU you use, if you stick an SSD into the first M.2 slot, then the card will be forced to run in PCIe 4.0 x8 mode (the same as Gen 3 x16). Fortunately, no game comes anywhere near maxing out the bandwidth of the PCI Express graphics card connection but who’s to say that this won’t happen soon?

All of these frustrations would be forgivable if PCIe 5.0 SSDs were brilliant and worth buying. The sad fact of the matter is that they’re a waste of money. Sure, the peak performance in synthetic tests makes older Gen 4 drives look positively slow in comparison, but in real use, you’ll barely notice the difference.

That might seem very odd, given that one of the fewPCIe 5.0 SSDs worth consideringhas peak sequential read/writes well over 10,000 MB/s—a basic Gen 4 drive will only be half that rate. The reason is that games, applications, and even entire operating systems have all been designed around moving small amounts of data and only when needed, because most PCs don’t have very fast storage. Gen 5 SSDs can only show their true limits in very specific scenarios, few of which are ever experienced in gaming or general PC use.

Then you have price and heat rubbing salt into the wound. Head over to the likes of Newegg and look at how mucha genuine Gen 5 SSD costs, i.e. ones that make full use of the connection’s performance. You’re looking at $150 or more for a 1TB PCIe 5.0 SSD and for that amount of money, you can get one of thebest 2TB Gen 4 drivesand still have change.

Is Gen 5 really suffering from early adopter problems or is it a case that vendors aren’t interested in supporting it all properly?

One could argue that this is just a case of ‘early adopter’ problems and that it will all get much better as the technology advances. While that’s certainly true, it’s worth noting that the PCIe 5.0 spec was released almost four years ago, and AMD’s Ryzen 7000-series came to market in the second half of 2022. So is Gen 5 really suffering from early adopter problems or is it a case that vendors aren’t interested in supporting it all properly?

This is especially true for SSDs. To be fully PCIe 5.0 compliant, the controller chip needs to run faster than a Gen 4 one and the NAND flash memory chips also need to read and write data at a much higher rate. At the moment, very few companies have chips that can do all of this and those that can, unfortunately, generate a lot of heat. The market for Gen 5 SSDs ismuchsmaller than that for Gen 4 drives, so the tiny demand means the relative costs are higher, too.

Gen 5 SSDs—fast, hot, and expensive. Umm, no thanks.(Image credit: Future)

Crucial T700 SSD

That all said, AMD and Intel haven’t done the best of jobs when it comes to actually implementing PCIe 5.0—in the case of the former, the Gen 5 graphics card slot is wasted, as nobody sells a Gen 5 card, and thedeliberate chipset limitation between E and non-E motherboardsjust adds confusion to it all. It’s also completely unnecessary, as there’s physically no difference between the chips used in, say, a B650 and B650E motherboard.

Intel clearly wasn’t all that interested in Gen 5 PCIe, as its implementation in its 14th Gen desktop CPUs and 700-series chipset amounts to a PCIe 5.0 x16 slot, a maximum of one Gen 5 M.2 slot, and a whole bunch of irritating configuration restrictions. It doesn’t look like Intel will be offering anything significantly better withArrow Lake, either.

PCIe 5.0 is pretty much useless at the moment or at the very least, used-less, if that makes any sense. Support for it in the immediate future doesn’t look that much better, either, but fortunately for us, Gen 4 is more than good enough. That technology is coming up to being seven years old now but we’re still way off the point where it’s a limitation in gaming. At some point in time, every desktop PC will be fully Gen 5, from top to bottom, though at the rate that PCI Express gets implemented, we won’t need to worry about that for a long time.

Let’s hope that we’re not having the same problems again but with Gen 7 or the like!

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