But what is PCIe 5.0, and should you rush out to buy a PCIe 5.0 motherboard?
What Is PCIe?
PCIe is shorthand for Peripheral Component Interconnect Express.
It needed to have great performance, and it needed to be versatile and compact.
PCI-SIG has also chosen to make the PCIe standard as backward compatible as possible.
What is PCIe Used For?
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The PCIe interface is usually used to connect high-performance peripherals to your box.
To account for that, there are multiple variants of the physical PCIe connector.
What are PCIe Lanes, and What Do x1, x4, x8, and x16 Mean?
The PCIe 5.0 standard calls for transfer speeds of 8 gigabytes per second (GB/s) per lane.
The total bandwidth of a lane is split between sending and receiving data.
So a single lane with a bandwidth of 8 GB/s can send 4 GB/s and receive 4 GB/s simultaneously.
Hardware that plugs into those ports are sized accordingly.
It is pretty common to see x1, x4, and x16 PCIe ports on regular consumer motherboards.
Related:What Is the M.2 Expansion Slot, and How Can I Use It?
Besides the regular PCIe ports, there is one noteworthy outlier: theM.2 slot.
The M.2 port is the standard forhigh-speed NVMe solid-state drives (SSDs).
M.2 isn’t physically compatible with standard PCIe ports, but it uses a PCIe x4 connection.
What Is Different About PCIe 5.0?
That means NVMe drives that support PCIe 5.0 speeds have read and write speeds of close to 16 GB/s.
For context, regular SATA SSDs top out at about 550 megabytes per second (MB/s).
PCIe 5.0 NVMe drives — when they arrive — promise to be about 30x faster.
Loading times will be a thing of the past.
Scientific and engineering applications will certainly benefit from the increased bandwidth too.
Related:PCIe 6.0: What’s New, and When Can You Get It?
What Does PCIe 5.0 Mean For Consumers?
As of the time of writing, August 2022, not much.
There are no consumer solid-state drives that are designed with the PCIe 5.0 standard available.
There are only a handful of enterprise options, likeSamsung’s PM1743.
Consumer solid-state drives that implement PCIe 5.0have been spotted, so they’re probably not far off.
In the meantime,the PCIe 6.0 standardhas already been defined.
In the world of PC hardware, there’s always something newer and better on the horizon.
