PCIe5(AM5) vs PCIe4(AM4)

[blueturtle]

Currently have a MSI B550-A Pro, 64GB Corsair 3200, Two M.2 Samsung 980 Pro's, MSI GTX 1660 Ti 6GB.

MY old trusty MSI GTX 1660Ti was a solid gpu for my passed needs, was planning on upgrading when Nvidia GPUs prices got more reasonable but thats not going to happen lol. Also the new Nvidia gpu driver, and Nvidia stop supporting (phx, opengl, opencl) old trusty, I call BS, but it is a 4 years old now.

The other day i was moving my monster case(will be replaced soon) and tweaked the 1st GPU slot on my cureent motherboard. And now using the 2nd PCIe slot,
(link) https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/B550-A-PRO/Specification
PCIe 4.0/ 3.0 x16 slot (PCI_E1)
PCIe 3.0 x16 slot (PCI_E3), supports x4 speed (currently using.

Even with using the the secondary gpu slot(e3) the system still has been rock solid. debating on replaing the MSI MB with another Pro, or another MSI B550 board but at that point do I consider moving on to AM5. I would like to run two GPU's on my next build, most likely two of Intel's upcoming Pro GPUs.

That said, can you even run two GPU's on a AM5 X870E? or would anything even fully saturate PCIe 4.0/ 3.0 x16, PCIe 3.0 x16(4x) and PCIe 5(16/8x)? Given Nvidia has only given up garage, reselling old tech at 9000x markup. I could see a RTX 3090 saturate a PCIe4/16x?

 

[DemonicRyzen666]

Currently have a MSI B550-A Pro, 64GB Corsair 3200, Two M.2 Samsung 980 Pro's, MSI GTX 1660 Ti 6GB.

MY old trusty MSI GTX 1660Ti was a solid gpu for my passed needs, was planning on upgrading when Nvidia GPUs prices got more reasonable but thats not going to happen lol. Also the new Nvidia gpu driver, and Nvidia stop supporting (phx, opengl, opencl) old trusty, I call BS, but it is a 4 years old now.

The other day i was moving my monster case(will be replaced soon) and tweaked the 1st GPU slot on my cureent motherboard. And now using the 2nd PCIe slot,
(link) https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/B550-A-PRO/Specification
PCIe 4.0/ 3.0 x16 slot (PCI_E1)
PCIe 3.0 x16 slot (PCI_E3), supports x4 speed (currently using.

Even with using the the secondary gpu slot(e3) the system still has been rock solid. debating on replaing the MSI MB with another Pro, or another MSI B550 board but at that point do I consider moving on to AM5. I would like to run two GPU's on my next build, most likely two of Intel's upcoming Pro GPUs.

That said, can you even run two GPU's on a AM5 X870E? or would anything even fully saturate PCIe 4.0/ 3.0 x16, PCIe 3.0 x16(4x) and PCIe 5(16/8x)? Given Nvidia has only given up garage, reselling old tech at 9000x markup. I could see a RTX 3090 saturate a PCIe4/16x?

Are you using these multi-GPU for A.I use, or CAD/3D software?

 

[Toothless]

You're looking at probably bumping to x670(e) or x870(e) for the PCI lanes. Any card will be fine on 4.0 x8.

 

[Chrispy_]

PCIe bandwidth depends entirely on what you're doing.

Gaming obviously needs bandwidth, and it matters most when your GPU itself doesn't have enough VRAM. If you're going to be buying midrange GPUs for non-gaming, then unfortunately the best option right now is still Nvidia - for reasons of CUDA support. The 50-series do still support OpenCL, OpenGL. I think the caveat was that OpenCL 32-bit is being dropped but anything not on 64-bit these days is probably so old that you can emulate it faster than it ever used to run natively.

However, if you are after a sensibly-priced productivity card, the 5060Ti 16GB is still decent, and it comes with a PEG x8 interface, the move to GDDR7 really solved the 4060Ti's bandwidth issues so CAD/simulation performance increased as well. Realistically you should be okay to use two on an AM4 board if it's more cost-effective to re-use your DDR4 and AM4 processor. Using two GPUs at x8/x8 depends on the board in question. Theoretically B550 boards can do this, but few manufacturers released boards that split the lanes like that, and they were usually high-end models that made no sense because you could have paid the same to get an X570 board instead. You're more likely to find a used X570 board that will give you x8/x8 support. AM5 is my recommendation if you're not just going to pick up a used X570 board on the cheap, and yes - most X870 boards will let you split the 16 dedicted PEG lanes from the CPU to two PCIe x16 slots in x8 mode for each slot. Check the specs page or user manual before paying, but I've not encountered an x670 or x870 board yet that can't do this.

I'd also question how much you need multiple GPUs these days. If you have an application or use case that fully supports and scales well with two GPUs, then don't let me talk you down, but typically I'm finding fewer and fewer real-world scenarios for multiple GPUs outside of servers running VDIs (one GPU per VDI) or distributed rendering (one GPU per render instance). You're usually better served by spending the same money two GPUs would cost on a single better GPU.

You haven't said what you're doing with your GPUs, but the key thing for a lot of scenarios now is how big the contiguous VRAM pool is - and two GPUs creating a contiguous VRAM pool is often down to some fussy configuration, if it's even supported by your use case at all. Hence my recommendation to buy a single card with more VRAM than two lesser GPUs.

 

[blueturtle]

Games:
FOV
Doom 2016
Doom Darkages(cant play yet)
Halflife's


Apps:
Blender 4
UE5

Im working on delv my first two video games, one would be something like FOV(Fallout New Vegas) but geared for 8-12 years old for the first chapter...

 

[Chrispy_]

Yeah, okay - get yourself a single Nvidia card with 12GB RAM.
On a super tight budget, a used 3060 12GB will do everything you need (including 1080p60 Doom Dark ages at lower settings

A used 4070, 4070S or a new 5070 would be good bang-for-the-buck gaming options.
A new 5060Ti 16GB is a reasonable jack of all trades at a fair price, and that's not something I've been able to say about any Nvidia GPU since the 3060 12GB launched 3 years ago.

 

[blueturtle]

https://us-store.msi.com/Motherboards/AMD-Platform-Motherboard/AMD-B550/B550-A-PRO

or

https://us-store.msi.com/Motherboards/AMD-Platform-Motherboard/AMD-B550/MAG-B550-TOMAHAWK

Ive had no system ram issues, should i just get another A-Pro board or spend the extra on the Tomahawk? I updated the bois first thing on my A-Pro. I also like to 6 sata's, Im guessing only 4 sata's are through the chipset or cpu? would be nice get 40-50TB stooge at close to 500mb/s? Wheres a solid store to get reliable 3.5 hdd's?

 

[Chrispy_]

Both are solid. I have probably a dozen of each in the office fleet with no obvious issues. The Tomahawk is slightly nicer (integrated IO shield, additional 2.5GbE LAN, a second M.2 heatsink) but if those features don't matter to you then save your money and get the A-Pro.

Both are x4 (electrically) in the second PCIe x16 slot so neither are recommendations for dual-GPU but if you're taking my "get a better single GPU" advice to heart then that's a non-issue.

There are plenty of people moving on from AM4 now and selling upper-tier X570 boards for the same sort of money as a new B550 board. The X570S is particularly appealing as it doesn't require a chipset fan. Both the MSI Tomahawk X570S and Gigabyte X570S UD are worth hunting for if you can get them in good condition for less than new B550 A-Pro.

Wheres a solid store to get reliable 3.5 hdd's?

I have no idea about good HDD sellers in the US, you'd have to hope someone else reads this with experience in the US, or start a new thread.

Here in the UK I have to avoid Amazon and Ebuyer who will both ship drives loose in nothing more than a jiffy bag rattling around in a larger box with other goods. It's like they have no understanding of the fragility or shock tolerance, because they're selling bulk-packaged OEM drives to end users and when I bulk-order drives direct from distributor I'll get cartons with 10, 12, 16, 20 drives all sat in a soft-foam frame that prevents any drives from moving. These are boxes sealed and direct from WD/Seagate/Toshiba so I'm pretty sure those are what Amazon/Ebuyer are getting and then just sending the bare drives on to consumers without the benefit of their foam carcass.

 

[Waldorf]

@blueturtle
not sure why you still want to stay with sata drives.
upgrade the board to x570, you can get up to 5 (usable) M.2 slots and still use one/two 16x slots, and even if you get one with less, just using usb 3 (10/20G) will still be way faster (external pcie enclosure/drive) than any sata drive will ever get.

 

[_roman_]

or would anything even fully saturate PCIe 4.0/ 3.0 x16, PCIe 3.0 x16(4x) and PCIe 5(16/8x)?

for graphic card it's hard to say. I think nvme will saturate PCIE.

Those usb suggestion is nice but the i/o will be limited by the usb hubs and the mainboard architecture. The mainboard may slow down the achievable performance in some cases.

on my previous X670 mainboard and current X670E mainboard some data trafic is limited by the connection from chipset a to chipset b to the cpu.

When I do backups from the internal nvme to usb 10gbps usb nvme bridge It's obvious there is hardly any other data trafic influencing this.

--

In my viewpoint low VRAM graphic cards will swap out more data over the PCIE bus to the graphic card.

GPU's on a AM5 X870E?

You may read the mainboard manual first. I think x870E has similar to X670 or x670E as far as i know only 20 PCIE lanes because of the Ryzen cpu restrictions. That also depends if you use 7000 or 9000 ryzen cpus. I think I saw an option on my msi mainboard and also on the previous asus mainboard for 8 pcie lanes and on the other slot also 8 pcie lanes. I think those are gen 4 lanes.
Two graphic cards with 16 lanes each will not be possible as far as i know on am5 / am4

 

[Ruru]

@blueturtle
not sure why you still want to stay with sata drives.

Why ditch working drives just because they use older interface? At least I'm going to use my 480GB + 2x 240GB drives as long as they'll last

 

[Waldorf]

@Ruru
my question was regarding ports. never said anything about ditching when it comes to drives.

because of OPs non-gaming use/dev stuff and very likely "moving" large amounts of data around?

when i started editing (de/encoding) FHD and now UHD content, it makes a big difference if i can read/write @3-5x times faster than any sata drive ever will (for things like shadow file creation).
given the fact that the system will probably used for a while, why not go with what will be an improvement, and allow for adding faster drives?

 

[Ruru]

@Ruru
my question was regarding ports. never said anything about ditching when it comes to drives.

because of OPs non-gaming use/dev stuff and very likely "moving" large amounts of data around?

when i started editing (de/encoding) FHD and now UHD content, it makes a big difference if i can read/write @3-5x times faster than any sata drive ever will (for things like shadow file creation).
given the fact that the system will probably used for a while, why not go with what will be an improvement, and allow for adding faster drives?

Ah, my bad. Depends of the user of course, I have just games on my SATA SSDs, that's why they're still kickin' around.

 

[dgianstefani]

Currently have a MSI B550-A Pro, 64GB Corsair 3200, Two M.2 Samsung 980 Pro's, MSI GTX 1660 Ti 6GB.

MY old trusty MSI GTX 1660Ti was a solid gpu for my passed needs, was planning on upgrading when Nvidia GPUs prices got more reasonable but thats not going to happen lol. Also the new Nvidia gpu driver, and Nvidia stop supporting (phx, opengl, opencl) old trusty, I call BS, but it is a 4 years old now.

The other day i was moving my monster case(will be replaced soon) and tweaked the 1st GPU slot on my cureent motherboard. And now using the 2nd PCIe slot,
(link) https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/B550-A-PRO/Specification
PCIe 4.0/ 3.0 x16 slot (PCI_E1)
PCIe 3.0 x16 slot (PCI_E3), supports x4 speed (currently using.

Even with using the the secondary gpu slot(e3) the system still has been rock solid. debating on replaing the MSI MB with another Pro, or another MSI B550 board but at that point do I consider moving on to AM5. I would like to run two GPU's on my next build, most likely two of Intel's upcoming Pro GPUs.

That said, can you even run two GPU's on a AM5 X870E? or would anything even fully saturate PCIe 4.0/ 3.0 x16, PCIe 3.0 x16(4x) and PCIe 5(16/8x)? Given Nvidia has only given up garage, reselling old tech at 9000x markup. I could see a RTX 3090 saturate a PCIe4/16x?

You can't run two GPUs with full x16 on any of the current consumer platforms, from either AMD or Intel.

That said, if you do plan to run multi GPU of newer generations, it's much better to have Gen 5/Gen 4 x8 x8 instead of Gen 4/Gen 3 x8/x8.

You also can't use more than around two M.2 drives without making that second x16 slot run at x4.

Obviously this is mostly relevant if you are using high end GPUs. For low end GPUs that support Gen 4/Gen 5, even x4 is enough, you'll lose a small amount of performance, but without spending $2k just on CPU/Platform to have two real x16 x16 slots, without lane sharing with M.2 etc, that's just the way it is.

Yeah, okay - get yourself a single Nvidia card with 12GB RAM.
On a super tight budget, a used 3060 12GB will do everything you need (including 1080p60 Doom Dark ages at lower settings

A used 4070, 4070S or a new 5070 would be good bang-for-the-buck gaming options.
A new 5060Ti 16GB is a reasonable jack of all trades at a fair price, and that's not something I've been able to say about any Nvidia GPU since the 3060 12GB launched 3 years ago.

5060 Ti 16 GB will lose a small amount of perf from x8 gen 4 rather than the x8 gen 5 it's designed for.

I'm not sure I'd recommend sticking with AM4 if you have to replace motherboard anyway.

Depending on where you are, 265K with $150 mobo will give you both Gen 5 M.2 and x16 slot, and total platform cost including RAM can be less than $500 USD.

To be clear, if you're running more than two M.2 drives, you're likely going to see even the first x16 slot drop to x8, but this isn't much of an issue on a Gen 5 board with a Gen 5 GPU.

There's also behind the scenes fkery going on with the dual chipset AMD boards, might be resolved with Zen 6 mobos, but the x800 series boards are literaly just x600 series boards with some additional USB/WiFi etc. The issue is the two chipsets are connected with just a x4 interface, so while you do technically have more connectivity, only one of those chipsets is connected to the CPU, so not ony do you have to deal with the usual "direct CPU attached lanes are faster than chipset attached lanes", but also "second chipset attached devices are slower than first chipset attached devices, especially if you're using the first chipset for bandwidth in some other task at the same time".

Like all consumer boards, yes you "get" x amount of connectivity, but there's a lot of * and lane sharing.

One of the reasons I prefer the Z890 platform with single chipset, X3D chips are worth the AM5 boards, but anything lower and Intel is better if you're saturating your PCIE, IMO.

Would be fine if the interchipset and chipset to CPU link was x4 gen 5, but literally everything off both chipsets is talking to CPU over x4 gen 4.

For comparison, here's Arrow Lake Z890 block diagram. Note that the CPU/Chipset connection is x8 Gen 4, not x4 Gen 4, and there's only a single chipset, no daisy chaining.

 

[Chrispy_]

I'm not sure I'd recommend sticking with AM4 if you have to replace motherboard anyway.

I absolutely disagree with that, because we still don't know all of OP's specs. Changing to AM5 means throwing away 64GB of perfectly good DDR4, and OP might have a decent editing/productivity CPU like a 5900X that's going to be perfectly decent for a few more years.

You're recommending spending ~$650 (current Newegg median prices) on something like a $300 intel 265K, $200 Z890 board, and $150 for 64GB of new DDR5 when their existing investment might still be perfectly viable for the sake of a simple $150 motherboard replacement.

Sure, if OP is running an old Ryzen 5 3600 or similar then a complete platform upgrade makes more sense but the age of OPs other hardware paints it as a Zen3 system, most likely.

@blueturtle - what CPU are you running, and do you have a budget?

 

[phanbuey]

3090 isnt going to saturate gen 4 slot since 3090 and 4090 are both gen 4 cards.

Also somewhat counter-intuitively, the lower end cards with less vram tend to benefit more from faster PCI-E and Re-bar, as they swap more often to ram than higher end cards with more framebuffer(vram) - either way, it's not a huge difference until you get to gen 2.

A 5090 barely saturates a gen 3 pcie:

You don't need to upgrade your mobo on account of PCIE. Also 2 gpus isn't really a thing unless you're mining crypto or running AI locally - you're better off getting one GPU that's more powerful over 2x less powerful ones.

 

[dgianstefani]

I absolutely disagree with that, because we still don't know all of OP's specs. Changing to AM5 means throwing away 64GB of perfectly good DDR4, and OP might have a decent editing/productivity CPU like a 5900X that's going to be perfectly decent for a few more years.

You're recommending spending ~$650 (current Newegg median prices) on something like a $300 intel 265K, $200 Z890 board, and $150 for 64GB of new DDR5 when their existing investment might still be perfectly viable for the sake of a simple $150 motherboard replacement.

Sure, if OP is running an old Ryzen 5 3600 or similar then a complete platform upgrade makes more sense but the age of OPs other hardware paints it as a Zen3 system, most likely.

@blueturtle - what CPU are you running, and do you have a budget?

It doesn't mean throwing away anything. It's called the second hand market, you just sell it.

 

[Waldorf]

@dgianstefani
incorrect.
you can have 4 m.2 (pcie) without sharing, only 5/6 will take share.

 

[anonuser57]

On AM5 splitting the X16 slot into 2 X8 slots isn't restricted to the top end chipset. ASUS had a b650 with the feature and Gigabyte has a b850 with the feature.

 

[agent_x007]

I'm with "if your GPUs get's meaningful performance bump over PCI-e gen speed change - it doesn't have enough VRAM" crowd.

5060 Ti :

9060 XT :

 

[dgianstefani]

@dgianstefani
incorrect.
you can have 4 m.2 (pcie) without sharing, only 5/6 will take share.

Two connected to CPU, two connected to chipset right.

I'm talking about when two x8 GPUs though, AFAIK using the second x16 slot in any way even at x8 will typically disable at least one M.2, or several SATA ports etc, depending on implementation.

Do you mean with X870E or X570?

Yep, just checked. AM5 CPU= 28 lanes, 4 reserved for chipset connection, so 1x16 and 2x4 M.2.

So yeah, rest of those M.2 functionally share a x4 connection along with a lot of USB, SATA etc.

On AM5 splitting the X16 slot into 2 X8 slots isn't restricted to the top end chipset. ASUS had a b650 with the feature and Gigabyte has a b850 with the feature.

Ofc, just using X870E as an example as its best case scenario.

 

[blueturtle]

Current system:
MSI B550_A Pro
AMD Ryzen 7 5700X
https://www.techpowerup.com/cpu-specs/ryzen-7-5700x.c2755
64GB Corsair 3200/cl16
Two M.2 Samsung 980 Pro's
MSI GTX 1660 Ti 6GB
Corsair HX1500i(atx3/pci5)stole it on sell

Budget for a new GPU would be $500, if i can steal a rtx 3060_12GB for $300 would be sweet. As far as me wanting the 40/50TB of min of 500mb/s, some of my older textures, rigging models are close to 1TB. Single 2tb OR 4tb m.2 drives just arent enough. Im not using overprived POS crappy ext USB hdd drives. Id rather spend $1K on 4 great 3.5 hdd's that I can get 5 plus years of work out of.

 

[dgianstefani]

Current system:
MSI B550_A Pro
AMD Ryzen 7 5700X
https://www.techpowerup.com/cpu-specs/ryzen-7-5700x.c2755
64GB Corsair 3200/cl16
Two M.2 Samsung 980 Pro's
MSI GTX 1660 Ti 6GB
Corsair HX1500i(atx3/pci5)stole it on sell

Budget for a new GPU would be $500, if i can steal a rtx 3060_12GB for $300 would be sweet. As far as me wanting the 40/50TB of min of 500mb/s, some of my older textures, rigging models are close to 1TB. Single 2tb OR 4tb m.2 drives just arent enough. Im not using overprived POS crappy ext USB hdd drives. Id rather spend $1K on 4 great 3.5 hdd's that I can get 5 plus years of work out of.

For $500 game dev work there's two choices 5060 Ti 16GB or 4070/5070 12 GB. Both significantly faster than a 3060.

Budget for a new GPU would be $500, if i can steal a rtx 3060_12GB for $300 would be sweet. As far as me wanting the 40/50TB of min of 500mb/s, some of my older textures, rigging models are close to 1TB. Single 2tb OR 4tb m.2 drives just arent enough. Im not using overprived POS crappy ext USB hdd drives. Id rather spend $1K on 4 great 3.5 hdd's that I can get 5 plus years of work out of.

You're also not going to get 500 MB/s out of mechanical hard drives unless they're in RAID stripe.

 

[_roman_]

You may test first with only one new HDD to see real life performance.

When my very old HDD gets filled with more download files it takes really quite a while until i see even the directory contents. This is not file system releated. Moving Windows games to that trash drive takes and takes and takes time. Or smaller iso images in total of less than 10GB.

I would be more realistic and consider 50 - 100 MB/s use rate of a hdd. File system, operating system, mainboard and hdd in question influence this a lot. Feel free to argue, but its 200MB/s. ...

Some operating systems have several choices of file systems which include encryption and / or file compression. These days it also matters write performance vs read performance.

 

[agent_x007]

Where modern HDD performance stands :

^Expect a bit better with newer generation ones (up to 300MB/s Avg. best case today IIRC)
They are expensive though, since they require HAMR, Helium seals, and other such things.