PCIe 5.0: What are the Advantages of PCIe Gen 5.0?

The newer PCIe 5.0 standards mean a higher-bandwidth connection to GPUs, SSDs and other peripherals.

Intel 12th Gen (and newer) systems add support for PCIe 5.0, while 11th Gen added support for PCIe 4.0. All generations of PCIe are backwards compatible.

What is PCIe?

Before we talk about PCIe 5.0, let us first understand what PCI-Express is. Commonly abbreviated as PCIe (short for Peripheral Component Interconnect Express) is an important interface standard that lets you connect various devices to your motherboard to communicate with the CPU. These include graphics cards, solid-state drives (SSDs), sound cards, capture cards, USB hubs and various other components. They’re the elongated slots on your motherboard that run parallel to one another.

The first PCIe standard was announced in 2003 and was released as a replacement for older standards like PCI, PCI-X and APG. Over the years, the standard has seen updates and a significant increase in speed and bandwidth.

Here’s a look at all the PCIe generations that have been announced so far:

PCIe Generation	Bandwidth	Gigatransfer	Frequency
PCIe 1.0	8GBps	2.5GTps	2.5GHz
PCIe 2.0	16GBps	5GTps	5GHz
PCIe 3.0	32GBps	8GTps	8GHz
PCIe 4.0	64GBps	16GTps	16GHz
PCIe 5.0	128GBps	32GTps	32GHz

PCIe connectors on motherboards vary in size, indicated by the lane counts: x1, x2, x4, x8, x16, and x32, which dictate the slot’s bandwidth. For example, a PCIe 4.0 x16 slot reaches up to 64GBps bandwidth, ideal for high-speed graphics cards. Smaller x4 slots are commonly used for M.2 and PCIe SSDs, and x1 slots cater to devices like USB hubs and Ethernet ports. The largest x32 slots, not typical in consumer electronics due to their cost, split bandwidth equally between data transmission and reception.

What is PCIe 5.0?

Currently, PCIe 4.0 is the most common and widely used standard. Like all the previous versions, it is backward compatible and offers up to 16GTps (giga-transfers per second) speeds and a bandwidth of 64GBps. PCIe 5.0 is an update to the PCIe 4.0 standard, where the bandwidth, giga-transfer and frequency are all doubled. Essentially, PCIe 5.0 will offer 32GTps of transfer speeds, a 128GBps bandwidth in an x16 configuration and a frequency of 32GHz.

Can I Upgrade to PCIe 5.0?

As mentioned before, Intel’s 12th-gen Alder Lake processors and the upcoming AMD Ryzen 7000 processors both support PCIe 5.0. While there are a few compatible motherboards, components like GPUs, storage and other add-on cards that support PCIe 5.0 are yet to hit the markets. It is expected that the first wave of devices that can fully take the advantage of PCIe 5.0 will arrive later this year.

The new standard will be a lot more useful for machine learning and artificial intelligence, data centres and other high-performance computing environments, thanks to the increase in speeds and bandwidth.

Is PCIe 5.0 worth it?

The PCIe 5.0 standard, enhancing transfer speeds and bandwidth beyond Gen 4, mainly benefits from increased communication speed and reduced data transfer latency. However, these advantages have limited real-world impact, as performance gains outside of extensive file transfers are marginal. Moreover, until GPUs evolve to fully exploit PCIe 5.0, graphics performance will not see significant improvements, as current Nvidia and AMD cards do not fully utilize PCIe 4.0 bandwidth.

PCIe 5.0 Motherboards

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