Does your computer support PCI-Express 5.0 SSDs?

[AsRock]

My first real PC (after a hand-me-down i286 with 1.92MB, no not a typo, yes that's megabytes of memory) was a Pentium III Slot 1 system. That was back when you could overclock a Celeron from 300 to 800MHz simply by playing with the jumpers on the board. Sadly my P3 was only a Katmai not a Coppermine, but I still pushed that chip from 450MHz to 600MHz without touching anything except those jumpers. Never had any instability from it either, and that thing served well for literally years until I blew my long-saved paper route wages on an Athlon XP 2000+ system.

(Not-so-)Fun fact, the S3 integrated graphics on the AXP system were barely an upgrade over the discrete SiS 6326 4MB (again, not a typo) AGP card that came with the much older P3 system.

There's no NVMe SSD designed to use more than 4 lanes of PCIe...

Good time's upgradable video card ( 1/2meg a time ) and math processors, fun days and yes i remember. But slot 1 was different was like a addin card and Intel back then tried to block overclocking but people found out that covering a pin or 2 could get around it.

 

[arestavo]

I mean, yes - my motherboard has NVME PCIE m.2 slots and thus, technically "supports PCIE 5.0 SSDs." That doesn't mean that they support PCIE 5.0 bandwidth.

 

[Deleted member 211755]

I just checked: latest BIOS firmware for my Tomahawk Max B450 doesn't include PCI 4.0 support like some B450 do.
I don't even have 4.0 and 5.0 is still far out for me.
I suppose I won't lose much performance when I upgrade my GPU and CPU and keep the board... just for a bit more time

 

[AusWolf]

I wonder how many of the people who voted 'yes' actually mean "well, I can plug a PCI-e 5.0 SSD into my system, but it will run at 4.0/3.0 speeds" which is not what the question meant, imo.

 

[wEeViLz]

I wonder how many of the people who voted 'yes' actually mean "well, I can plug a PCI-e 5.0 SSD into my system, but it will run at 4.0/3.0 speeds" which is not what the question meant, imo.

Faith.

 

[Deleted member 211755]

I wonder how many of the people who voted 'yes' actually mean "well, I can plug a PCI-e 5.0 SSD into my system, but it will run at 4.0/3.0 speeds" which is not what the question meant, imo.

My thought was like: five point o? Oh, not even four point o. Oh no. haha

 

[xu^]

I think theres more ppl still on 3.0 never mind 4.0, i dont see a big rush to 5.0 for not really any benefit, unless u count an emptier bank balance

 

[Deleted member 211755]

I think theres more ppl still on 3.0 never mind 4.0, i dont see a big rush to 5.0 for not really any benefit, unless u count an emptier bank balance

I just saw some benchmarks from people. GPU performance difference between PCI 3, 4 and 5 is almost non-existent
so if one wants to change boards, they'd do it only for SSD performance benefits.
I can see a lot of content creators who'd need as much of that SSD performance as possible,
but regular users, even gamers shouldn't feel the need to spend so much for the new tech.
I use PCI 3, I have one NVME just above 2 GB/s read/write and two SATA SSDs.
I never felt like I was waiting too long for a game to load.
Even massive open world ones like Valhalla or Witcher 3.

 

[Arsouf]

Back when I had the RTX 3090, it was runing at x8 when my PCI-e 4.0 SSD was in the PCI-e 5.0 x4 slot of the ASUS Z690 Extreme.
Even though I set my SSD and GPU at PCI-e 4.0 in bios, it seems that no matter what SSD is plugged into this slot, it cuts GPU bandwidth by half.

Has anyone experienced this?

 

[Deleted member 211755]

Back when I had the RTX 3090, it was runing at x8 when my PCI-e 4.0 SSD was in the PCI-e 5.0 x4 slot of the ASUS Z690 Extreme.
Even though I set my SSD and GPU at PCI-e 4.0 in bios, it seems that no matter what SSD is plugged into this slot, it cuts GPU bandwidth by half.

Has anyone experienced this?

Sounds strange. On that platform you probably had a CPU with enough lanes to get your 3090 to work at full bandwidth,
no matter how many SSDs you plugged in.
Did you try a BIOS update?

 

[Arsouf]

Sounds strange. On that platform you probably had a CPU with enough lanes to get your 3090 to work at full bandwidth,
no matter how many SSDs you plugged in.
Did you try a BIOS update?

Yes I was up to date by the time but with my current Z790 Extreme I didn't try to put my SSD into the PCI-e 5.0 slot also because my previous Z690 Extreme had one of the 2 screws of the OLED screen above the slot damaged so unable to unscrew this one and had to take off my SSD with very little room.
So I don't want to touch it on the new mobo unless there is benefit to put my 2 SSDs on CPU mode instead of chipset mode.

 

[Hyderz]

still on pci-e 3.0

 

[Ruru]

PCIe 3.0 mobo (Crosshair VII Hero, X470)
PCIe 4.0 CPU (AMD R5 3600)
PCIe 4.0 GPU (AMD 6700 XT)
PCIe 4.0 SSD (Kingston NV2)

Because of mobo, everything runs @ 3.0

 

[Chrispy_]

I have a machine at work with a Gen5 slot, not sure why I need one though, it seems like current motherboards are going to be superseded and long-discontinued by the time Gen5 storage is actually relevant to real-world use in consumer PCs.

I'm also yet to see any benefit in Gen4 compared to Gen3. The difference between my newish 2TB SN850 and old 2018 WD Black 500GB exists only in synthetic benchmarks. I've tried and failed to find any real-world, storage-heavy scenarios where there's any measurable difference. Even sequential copies from one to the other don't run at the "theoretical" speed of either drive because of antivirus, and there are vanishingly few reasons why I'd be moving data around on two local disks of the same PC anyway! Realistically, 10GbE is the fastest data will possibly arrive onto the PC and need writing from a disk, and a Cheap, old PCIe 3.0 x2 drive like the SN550 will handle that with ease...

 

[Athlonite]

It all depends on what you mean by supports
can I run an PCIe 5.0 NVMe SDD in my system Yes does it run at PCIe 5.0 speeds No but then at the end of the day the only real difference between PCIe4.0 and 5.0 NVMe SSD's is sequential speeds so I see no real need for it

 

[OneMoar]

maybe an i dont care option?
actual performance bottleneck is random, not sequential performance and here we're bottlenecked by (current) nand design (better random performance would require drastically more channels, like two orders of magnitude more of them, which is not feasible/economic), so this is basically all snake oil
PCIe3.0x4 is more than fine for nand

this
8000Mb/s outta be enough for anybody

its gonna be several years before nand is fast enough for me to care (the fastest drives on the planet hit about 12GB/s is that more then 7? sure is. does it matter AT ALL nOPe

 

[TheinsanegamerN]

Nope. Gen 4 here, no need for gen 5 anytime soon.

Also what is with all the naval gazing in the replies? This isn't a hard question, apparently the concept of wether your board has PCIe 5.0 or not is college level dissertation these days......

 

[LabRat 891]

Yes, just not @ x4 Gen5 (Don't worry, I voted 'No' in the Poll)
I also have a Gen4 2230 M.2 in my SteamDeck.
(I got a heckova deal on a unit used for extensive testing of the model-series. Was cheaper than even a 1TB 2230 WD Blue gen3x4 NVMe)
I love backwards compatibility!

Serious question though: How will Gen5 drives do in Gen4 slots?
Gen4 is barely at saturation; one would hope to see a Gen5 drive fully saturate x4 lanes of Gen4.

There's no NVMe SSD designed to use more than 4 lanes of PCIe...

there are also none NVME ssds that use the pci-e soket

Except, all of the above quotes are extraordinarily incorrect*...
Here is but one example (amongst many):

Oracle® Flash Accelerator F320 PCIe Card User Guide

The Oracle Flash Accelerator F320 PCIe Card has the following key features:
■ NVM Express (NVMe)
■ PCI Express Gen3 - Single port x8 lanes
■ Enhanced Power-Loss Data Protection
■ LDPC and XOR Engine ECC
■ End-to-End Data Protection
■ Up to 128 I/O Queues per Port
■ Deallocate (TRIM) Command
■ PCI Express AER (Advanced Error Reporting)
■ 129 vectors for MSI-X Support
■ SSD Enhanced S.M.A.R.T. Feature Set
■ Hardware based AES-XTS 256-bit Encryption Engine
■ Static and Dynamic Wear Leveling

*"and there are nvme adapters card that each has its own lanes"
Yes, PCIe x4, x8, and x16 PCIe-switch equipped carrier cards like the QNAP QM2-4P-384 allow precisely that.

There are even some Carrier and HBA cards w/ Tri-Mode(SATA, SAS, NVMe) or NVMe-only RAID. Meaning NVMe RAID w/o needing an expensive VROC license, etc.:
Microchip Adaptec 24G SAS Tri-Mode RAID and HBA Launch - SereveTheHome Article By Cliff Robinson -July 21, 2021

 

[Vya Domus]

Yes but it's gonna be long before I am going to buy one, just ordered a KC3000, but I do plan to get one once I see a 2TB drive for a "reasonable" price.

 

[Athlonite]

Yes, just not @ x4 Gen5 (Don't worry, I voted 'No' in the Poll)
I also have a Gen4 2230 M.2 in my SteamDeck.
(I got a heckova deal on a unit used for extensive testing of the model-series. Was cheaper than even a 1TB 2230 WD Blue gen3x4 NVMe)
I love backwards compatibility!

Serious question though: How will Gen5 drives do in Gen4 slots?
Gen4 is barely at saturation; one would hope to see a Gen5 drive fully saturate x4 lanes of Gen4.






Except, all of the above quotes are extraordinarily incorrect*...
Here is but one example (amongst many):

View attachment 285564



*"and there are nvme adapters card that each has its own lanes"
Yes, PCIe x4, x8, and x16 PCIe-switch equipped carrier cards like the QNAP QM2-4P-384 allow precisely that.
View attachment 285565
There are even some Carrier and HBA cards w/ Tri-Mode(SATA, SAS, NVMe) or NVMe-only RAID. Meaning NVMe RAID w/o needing an expensive VROC license, etc.:
Microchip Adaptec 24G SAS Tri-Mode RAID and HBA Launch - SereveTheHome Article By Cliff Robinson -July 21, 2021

Those are just NVMe to PCIe slot adaptors so technically it is correct to say no NVMe SSD can be plugged straight into an PCIe slot they all require an adaptor of some kind to indirectly connect to the PCIe Bus. There are also no x8 NVMe SSD's it's the adaptor that is x8 not the NVMe SSD itself and that's because most if not all of those adaptors do some kind of RAID array so that the PC sees it as a single drive and to be able to make use of the extended bus bandwidth if you don't use the raid array capabilities of the adaptor card then you'll only ever see the same bandwidth in use as a single NVMe socket which is PCIe x4 not x8

 

[Fierce Guppy]

I thought it was a trick question and answered "yes" because even my 2014 built will support a PCIe 5.0 ssd being that the drive would be backward compatible.

 

[AusWolf]

I thought it was a trick question and answered "yes" because even my 2014 built will support a PCIe 5.0 ssd being that the drive would be backward compatible.

The question isn't about backwards compatibility. It's about actual 5.0 support.

 

[Wasteland]

I have a machine at work with a Gen5 slot, not sure why I need one though, it seems like current motherboards are going to be superseded and long-discontinued by the time Gen5 storage is actually relevant to real-world use in consumer PCs.

I'm also yet to see any benefit in Gen4 compared to Gen3. The difference between my newish 2TB SN850 and old 2018 WD Black 500GB exists only in synthetic benchmarks. I've tried and failed to find any real-world, storage-heavy scenarios where there's any measurable difference. Even sequential copies from one to the other don't run at the "theoretical" speed of either drive because of antivirus, and there are vanishingly few reasons why I'd be moving data around on two local disks of the same PC anyway! Realistically, 10GbE is the fastest data will possibly arrive onto the PC and need writing from a disk, and a Cheap, old PCIe 3.0 x2 drive like the SN550 will handle that with ease...

The only measurable difference is heat, lol. I actually bought a PCIe 4.0 drive awhile back thinking it was PCIe 3.0--wasn't paying a lot of attention and didn't care about the extra speed, for all the reasons you laid out. I just saw that it had good reviews, and figured that the low price meant 3.0. Only realized the drive's lofty PCIe status when I saw the temperature in HWINFO. Side note: some motherboard NVME heat sinks really seem to suck. Third-party solutions, even extremely cheap ones, absolutely annihilate the default config on my MSI boards--an improvement in excess of 20°C.

I'm not looking forward to the PCIe 5.0 era at all. We're already at a point where basically the only well-reviewed NVME drives are 4.0, presumably because manufacturers stopped making 3.0 variants to a high standard. (SATA SSDs seem largely stagnant too, but at least the alternative form factor guarantees SATA some measure of continued relevance.) Expect the same thing to happen with 5.0 drives. A few years from now, I'll have to sift through dozens of review articles raving, "blazing fast speeds, just apply LN2," to get some idea of what I should buy for my relatively modest use case. This tech is potentially very useful in an enterprise setting, but SSD "progress" is looking more and more like it's irrelevant, at best, for the average consumer.

 

[TheDeeGee]

No, and even if it did i'd still stick to Gen4 to avoid insanely large heatsinks with screaming 20mm fans.

 

[Patriot]

maybe an i dont care option?
actual performance bottleneck is random, not sequential performance and here we're bottlenecked by (current) nand design (better random performance would require drastically more channels, like two orders of magnitude more of them, which is not feasible/economic), so this is basically all snake oil
PCIe3.0x4 is more than fine for nand

Yeah, I was super sad to see optane die. Current NAND just doesn't cut it. We can make some fluffy benchmark number for sequential but random and low Q-depth really isn't improving.