What is PCIe 5? Explained Simply!

if you have built or bought a pc recently you may have come across the term pcie or pci express pc enthusiasts may already be familiar with what pci is and what it does but for those who have heard the term and just brushed it off as some complicated computer jargon let's break down what pci is and what we can expect from the new pce 5.0 standard that is coming new to motherboards and cpus pcie stands for peripheral component interconnect express yeah i know it's a bit of a mouthful hence why people just call it pci express or pcie pcie is one of two mainstream interconnects for your motherboard the other being usb just like usb these ports allow us to connect various devices to our pc but unlike usb pc is located on the motherboard directly the pcie ports are most commonly used for devices like graphics cards video capture cards audio cards network interface cards and even ssds this is because pc ports offer really high bandwidth as compared to the ports like usb also for devices like your graphics card they can't afford to work on a port with high latency and less bandwidth like a usb port consider it like this if the usb port on your pc are like intercity roads then pcie is like interstate highways they both serve different purposes but one allows for faster data transfer than the other at a much higher scale the usb interface is easier to use and obviously is more accessible meanwhile the pc slots offer really high data transmission rates that is just not possible on a usb port pce comes in a bunch of different physical configurations these are x1 x2 x4 x8 and x16 being the most popular the number after the x tells you how many lanes that the pce slot has lanes are the highways on which the data travels to and from the pc device or cart a pce x1 slot has one lane that can move one bit of data per cycle a pc x2 slot has two lanes and can move two bits per cycle so on and so on the important thing to know is that a particular graphics card or device can only take full advantage of the available lanes that it supports so for example you can insert a pc x1 graphics card into a pcie x16 slot but that card will transfer data at one single lane on the other hand same goes the way around if you insert a pca x8 card into a pcie x4 slot on your motherboard then you will only be using four lanes that are connected onto your motherboard essentially cutting your data transmission rate by half now these examples are obviously a little bit unrealistic but this is why it's important for people building new gaming pcs to match up the lanes available on their motherboard to the ones on their pc card that it supports no one wants to bottleneck their pc because they bought the wrong motherboard or even just tried using the wrong slot on your motherboard but lanes aren't the only important thing about pc ports the bandwidth on each of those single lanes are very important too currently the most commonly used pc generation which is pco 4.0 has a bandwidth of almost 64 gigabits gigabytes per second or 512 gigabits per second for an aggregated x16 interconnect to put this into perspective usb 3.1 gen 2 has a data transfer rate of 10 gigabits per second that is around 50 times less the transfer rate on pc 4.0 this further illustrates the huge difference in data transmissions rates using pce and usb intel was actually a little bit slow to accept pc 4.0 when intel released its 10th generation chipset codename comet lake it didn't actually support pc 4.0 this was disappointing for a lot of intel fans because their direct competitor amd offered pc 4.0 with both zen 2 and their zen 3 chipset but intel changed this all around luckily with their intel 11th gen rocket lake offering better performance and pc 4.0 support not just on the graphics card but also for nvme drives as well pcie 4.0 has been dominant for the past year or two but as people are just starting to upgrade their pcie pc builds to the new standard another standard is about to make an appearance when gen 4 first came out we saw a jump in motherboard prices due to motherboards requiring higher quality materials and more pcb layers these are both required to ensure gen 4 speeds are stable this is especially true of the amd x570 platform which had full gen 4 support on both the cpu lanes and chipset lanes we can only imagine that the same thing is going to happen with gen 5 and probably be a little bit worse since gen 5 is obviously going to be a new platform and is significantly faster than pc gen 4. but with intel supporting pce 5.0 only on the cpu motherboard prices might not be as expensive as they could be is much easier for motherboard manufacturers to build boards around one or two gen 5 pc slots than to build an entire board to support pc 5.0 sadly even though motherboards will be coming out with pc5 support soon there aren't actually that many devices on the market that can support pc 5.0 the current generation of nvidia rtx cards for example the 3000 series is based on the pc 4.0 architecture but pc 5.0 is expected to debut with various components out in 2022 maybe even 2023 depending on obviously the global situation so let's take a look at what makes pc 5.0 such a huge game changer potentially pc 5.0 as the name 5.0 suggests is the fifth generation of pcie it will bring an unprecedented 128 gigabytes per second throughput from a full duplex bandwidth of an x16 interface and for those wondering the specification is actually backwards compatible with previous pce generations an important thing to know is that your pc card will run at this lowest generation possible meaning that even if your motherboard supports pc 5.0 and your pc card let's say supports 4.0 you will only get the performance of a 4.0 slot you won't get the generation 5.0 we can expect that the next generation nvidia and amd gpus to support 5.0 but there's no official confirmation on that but do we actually need 5.0 i mean some of us have only just upgraded to pc 4.0 within the last year right so should we really be upgrading our systems to pc 5.0 when it becomes available well honestly that depends industry experts believe that we may see pc 5.0 and 4.0 coexist for a while this is because pc 5.0 will mostly be used for really high performance needs for things like gpus running artificial intelligence workloads and other networking applications we might also see our production studios who typically run extremely high-end systems to produce our favorite films to be the first to adopt this too we might also see pc 5.0 hit things like data sensors and uh high performance computing environments a regular pc user or even gamer will probably be fine with pc 4.0 for quite some time the main benefit will be when pc 5.0 ssds come to the market but even intel's older lake at the moment doesn't support ssds that have 5.0 support and we don't even know if amd will support it with their zen4 architecture which could be coming into late 2020 to 2023 until we see that despite the incredible speeds of pc 5.0 we have seen that it's pretty much overkill for most pc users and gamers people will only really take full advantage of pc 5.0 when it comes to things like ssds because the faster we can transfer things the better it is and for a lot of games and stuff like this where they can reach 100 gigabytes per second right these uh faster speeds could potentially make more of a difference to pc gamers and even content creators but with graphics card even the latest 1390 series of rtx cars from nvidia they don't fully utilize pc 4.0 so i can't imagine graphics cards really utilizing pc 5.0 and we're so close to uh the ssd standards reaching the limit of an x4 pc 4.0 slot so i can't imagine what the future will hold once pc 5.0 x4 slots start making its way to the main street the only people that will truly be able to take full advantage of the pc 5.0 standard will be people working with things like machine learning artificial intelligence production studios or in data centers frankly there isn't much need for that fast speed in our daily lives and like i said apart from potentially fast transfer speeds with nvme drives but that doesn't look like it's going to be coming for at least another year or two or if amd will even support it on their next platform just like intel hasn't but anyway that's it for today's video if you found this video interesting then please hit that like button and also hit that subscribe button and notification bell so you can stay updated with content like this anyway look after yourselves and i'll see you in the next video bye [Music]

Channel: SABRENT USA Official

Views: 27,209

Keywords: sabrent, sabrent ssd

Id: inIMIPb3ENc

Length: 10min 18sec (618 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 10 2021