PCIe Lane Data Capacity: Maximizing Your PC's Potential

peripheral component interconnect express or for short pcie uh that is going to be the subject of today's video so let's get started a typical full-size atx motherboard can contain a multitude of pcie lanes from different sizes and different speeds on each one let's start by talking about the sizes now on the board itself they usually come labeled somewhere near each lane saying whether it's pcie x1 x2 x4 x8 or x16 more modern boards usually only contain x1 or x16 but we will go through them all the x1 slot is easy enough it is the smallest one here usually there are some at the very top typically used for smaller cards like usb or wi-fi and the x16 will be typically the longest side one usually the x16 will also have these little clips on the end to help secure whatever card you have in place typically these are meant for your graphics card there actually aren't any x4 or x8 slots on this board but here's what it looks like notice that the x8 slot is very similar to the older gen pci slot not pcie slots but what do these numbers mean these are the number of lanes available for each slot to transfer data each lane will allow up to one bit of data per cycle and if you want to know more about what a cycle is or how it corresponds to a cpu check out my recent video explaining cpu frequency the link will be down in the description okay so now let's move on to the generations since not only can a slot be any of the previous sizes but also have different generational speeds from pcie 1.0 2.0 3.0 most recently 4.0 and 5.0 which isn't even out on consumer boards yet as you can probably expect the higher the generation or the higher slot capacity means the faster the speeds so here's a full theoretical bandwidth of each version and slot combination so as you see here a typical pcie 1.0 gen on an x4 lane can do one gigabyte per second but if you go to a pci 2.0 on the same x4 lane you can do two gigabytes per second so twice the speed of the previous generation and then going all the way to pcie 4.0 even the x1 slot gives you 2 gigabytes per second compared to the x4 slot of the gen 1. but i'll leave this up here if you guys want to pause it just to see the theoretical limits of each lane and each generation the motherboard will have to physically support the lanes you need but may have more lanes available than you can actually use so for example if you look up a processor check how many pcie lanes it supports you'll see here the ryzen 7 3700x says it supports 24 pcie lanes whereas the ryzen 7 2600x only supports 20. some chips can support as little as only 16 which is typically how much you use for one graphics card and others can support up to 64 or higher lanes most pci components actually don't require that many lanes something like a usb expansion card or wi-fi card will only need one an nvme sst can use up to four and graphics cards will be by far the heaviest users with a full x16 slot required another cool thing is that even if you have an x1 x4 or x8 card they can all be placed into an x16 slot and any kind of variation of the two so as you see here i have an x1 sound card but you can easily put that into an x16 slot and it'll work totally fine and that is all i have for you today for this explanation video if you guys have any questions as always leave them in the comments below check out the links i have in the description subscribe if you are not subscribed already and if you want me to make a different explanation video leave it there as well i love hearing suggestions and i will get to making that video as soon as i can otherwise i'll see you guys in the next video

Channel: Max's Tech

Views: 55,602

Keywords: Max, Tips, laptop, computer, tech, how, to, software, hardware, easy, max's, tutorial, fast, simple, internet, pc, mac, windows, amd, intel, explained, pci, pcie, express, lanes, motherboard, pci-e, speeds, 4.0, 3.0

Id: jCVKRaJbJMg

Length: 3min 27sec (207 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 15 2020