Question Real world PCIe 5 speed

In2Photos

Golden Member
Mar 21, 2007
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I'm planning to finally build a new PC later this year and am seriously considering going Zen4. With CPUs and MBs releasing late September but PCIe 5 drives not releasing until November it has me wondering if I should wait for the Gen 5 drives or not. My current desktop uses a SATA SSD which was notably faster than a HDD in real world use. My work laptop has an NVME drive and it's fast but I can't say that I notice the same difference between the HDD to SSD upgrade. Some reports have shown that Gen 5 drives could be twice as fast as Gen 4 drives, but will that be noticeable during real world use or just when benchmarking?
 

Tech Junky

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Jan 27, 2022
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It's a bunch of hype in real world you don't need the speed. The impact is seen mostly in loading the os or large games or bulk file copies.

A gen3 drive is 6x faster than your SATA and a gen4 is 10x faster.

Right now either will run about $100/TB and be sufficient. If you're running a server or app that is highly transactional then it might be useful.
 
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VirtualLarry

No Lifer
Aug 25, 2001
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Gen4 is already to the point of diminishing returns in terms of real-world performance, I think. But then, there's the DirectStorage API question, will it require PCI-E 5.0 / nvme 1.5?
 

kschendel

Senior member
Aug 1, 2018
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Just think about the numbers. PCIe 5 isn't going to do much for random I/O. Handwaving a bit, a decent PCIe 3 drive can (sequentially) read a 6 GB file in two seconds, ignoring OS overhead. PCIe 4 gets that down to a second. PCIe 5 will take it to a half-second. Will you notice? and how often do you read 5-10 GB files sequentially?
 

Hotrod2go

Senior member
Nov 17, 2021
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There are reviews of PCIe gen4 drives over on TPU with game loading times done earlier this year. The consensus is that even with gen4 drives, the software has not caught up with anything more than gen3 max speeds.
As usual, its all a case of the software taking time to catch up with the hardware but if the OP is not into gaming & into something niche, then it "may" benefit them.
 

CakeMonster

Golden Member
Nov 22, 2012
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Gen4 is already to the point of diminishing returns in terms of real-world performance, I think. But then, there's the DirectStorage API question, will it require PCI-E 5.0 / nvme 1.5?
It was stated a couple of years ago that DS would need PCIE3. And compared to current game design, up to 3.5GB/s should be a massive increase that allows for all sorts of inventive solutions. I'm obviously not gonna promise you that it will be enough since I have no additional insight, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's plenty of overhead and it works great when the first games arrive.
 

Justinus

Diamond Member
Oct 10, 2005
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I just picked up an SN850X 4TB with the intention to use it on a new X670E/7950X/7950XT build for a game drive to support DirectStorage and Smart Access Storage, however AMD has been cagey about details regarding Smart Access Storage support, only saying that "once we remove the platform bottlenecks some drives that relied on them don't perform so well relative to others" and that they would come out with a qualified vendor list of drives supported for Smart Access Storage.

The key here being Smart Access Storage is an AMD proprietary implementation that allegedly cuts out even more platform bottlenecks than traditional DirectStorage on just any old system with an NVME drive. I hope they share details soon, I suppose those details won't be until Zen 4 launch time or so at the end of the month, so.....

PCI-e 5.0 drives are supposed to start hitting around the same time, however I have only seen off the shelf designs using Phison controllers/etc. demonstrated. I refuse to use off the shelf designs because I want to support full stack custom designs, like the Samsung 980Pro/990Pro, SN850/850X, P41 Platinum, etc. as I firmly believe custom designs are better and also introduce more competition and diversity in the market offerings.

I don't expect any full stack custom designs for PCI-e 5.0 will debut anytime soon, unless somebody has a design ready to go and is waiting to demo/launch it later.
 

Sunburn74

Diamond Member
Oct 5, 2009
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I have a 2TB Samsung 980pro drive pcie4 drive. I came from an old Samsung data SSD (I think it was an 870 evo). No real world difference.
 

utahraptor

Golden Member
Apr 26, 2004
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Here is an odd one, I am getting a PCIE 5.0 SSD tomorrow, but my new computer won't be ready for awhile. If I have a PCIe 5.0 M.2 card could I theoretically put it in my PCIE 2.0 x16 slot that is unused on this motherboard and play with the SSD until the new computer is ready? I am not sure if it would run at 4x pcie 2.0 or 16 x pcie 2.0, but I am curious to try.

Edit, the mobo lists the slot as: - 1 x PCI Express 2.0 x16 slot (PCIE3: x4 mode) so I think it will run at PCIE 3 x4 rather than 2 x 16. They are equivilent in speed.