PCIE Gen 5 (unsure what it means)

[Elliott B]

Hey All,

Very recently started taking the time to understand the various parts of a computer. I have heard talk about Pcie Gen 5 and how the new graphics cards (rtx 4000 series) will use this style of connector.

My question is, would this mean that current motherboards would be unusable with the next gen graphics cards or simply that an adapter would be needed?

I have timestamped a video because I suspect I have explained this fairly poorly.

 

[sck451]

New graphics cards may well support PCIe gen 5, but they will almost certainly not require it. There may be a small performance benefit or certain features (low-level features, that is) that it offers, but it will not be significant.

You can run a 3090 on a PCIe 2.0 card. It's slightly limited, but it works just fine. It's definitely not worth a platform upgrade over. The same will be true of next gen cards. No adapter will be needed.