Greetings, Devil Dog! Welcome to the Call of Duty Forums. It looks like you're looking forward to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, but haven't created an account yet. Why not take a minute to 
KeyboardDemon
PC Gamer: Nearly Dangerous
@freakdaddy64 asked me this question in status post: Can we use PCI-e 4.0 cards in PCI-e 3.0 slot?
Yes we can, the MSI B450 Tomahawk Max (we both have the same mobo and CPU) has PCI-e 3.0 slots, but in my opinion this is not something to be concerned about.
To answer why?
Well, we don't fully know the overall difference this might make to performance but we do know that the new RTX 3000 series cards are PCI-e 4.0 and that they were demonstrated on PCs with Intel CPUs, Intel does not yet have a PCI-e 4.0 ready platform and yet there were no concerns over possible performance handicaps.
We will have to wait until tech YouTubers like Gamers Nexus and Jays Two Cents can get hold of these, I am sure both will test to see the differences between PCI-e 3.0 and 4.0. I don't think the differences will be that big at the moment, I think we will only really see the difference between PCI-e 3.0 and 4.0 when we have faster RAM that runs at 8400MT/s speeds instead of the 3200-3600MT/s typical speeds we're seeing in systems at the moment.
We have already seen this in HDDs, the interface speed of SATA saw steady increases with each new version, but the physical ability for a hard drive to shift data from the platter to the interface has not really improved much, it was SSD technology that has given us the ability to almost fully saturate the Sata interface with data, but now an NVME SSD can send data faster than the RAM in our systems can accept it.
To see the difference RAM speed makes to a system, and to find out for myself, I will run a test on 3dMark with my RAM running at the default speed of 2133MT/s instead of the current speed of 3200MT/s and post my results in this thread, but here are my current results for 3200MT/s RAM.
Right so a reset, change of RAM speed in the BIOS and a 3dMark Time Spy run later, I got this result, which means that with ram at 3200MT/s my system scored 20,985 while at 2133MT/s it scored 20,164 so there is a clear difference but not as big as I thought it would.
You can see more about what happened in this side by side comparison where we can see there were performances increases throughout all of the tests, or you can have a look at the main summary in this picture.
I was really expecting to see a bigger difference and this has kind of drifted off on a tangent from the original question, but to close what I was saying about RAM the difference in speed is roughly 3200MT/s ram being around 50% faster than 2133MT/s but the difference in the actual overall speed was relatively small.
Modern PCI-e 3.0 GPUs like the RTX 30070 that I used in this Firestrike test are fast, but currently they don't max out all of the data lanes on a PCI-e 3.0 connector, I think that the performance difference between a GPU that's designed to run on PCI-e 4.0 compared to that of the same GPU running on a PCI-e 3.0 connector would be equally small.
So, it would be reasonable to ask here, why do we need PCI-e 4.0 if the difference is that small?
I think the answer has more to do with pro-users, people that use workstations where they might need a lot of devices connected to their PC, here PCI-e 4.0 will allow more devices to run at full speed without the risk of being bottlenecked by other devices that share the same data lines. In my opinion, PCI-e 4.0 is not really a consumer technology, unless you're planning on running massive 4k and 8k video workflows for hours on a daily basis.
But here is an example of 3.0 vs 4.0 with a GPU on X470 and X570 motherboards:
So, that's my analysis, let me know if you think any differently.
Oops, sorry, I said above that I did a 3d Mark Time Spy test and then ended up tresting with Firestrike, if that can be fixed and then this message can be deleted and cast away forerver....
Yes we can, the MSI B450 Tomahawk Max (we both have the same mobo and CPU) has PCI-e 3.0 slots, but in my opinion this is not something to be concerned about.
To answer why?
Well, we don't fully know the overall difference this might make to performance but we do know that the new RTX 3000 series cards are PCI-e 4.0 and that they were demonstrated on PCs with Intel CPUs, Intel does not yet have a PCI-e 4.0 ready platform and yet there were no concerns over possible performance handicaps.
We will have to wait until tech YouTubers like Gamers Nexus and Jays Two Cents can get hold of these, I am sure both will test to see the differences between PCI-e 3.0 and 4.0. I don't think the differences will be that big at the moment, I think we will only really see the difference between PCI-e 3.0 and 4.0 when we have faster RAM that runs at 8400MT/s speeds instead of the 3200-3600MT/s typical speeds we're seeing in systems at the moment.
We have already seen this in HDDs, the interface speed of SATA saw steady increases with each new version, but the physical ability for a hard drive to shift data from the platter to the interface has not really improved much, it was SSD technology that has given us the ability to almost fully saturate the Sata interface with data, but now an NVME SSD can send data faster than the RAM in our systems can accept it.
To see the difference RAM speed makes to a system, and to find out for myself, I will run a test on 3dMark with my RAM running at the default speed of 2133MT/s instead of the current speed of 3200MT/s and post my results in this thread, but here are my current results for 3200MT/s RAM.
Right so a reset, change of RAM speed in the BIOS and a 3dMark Time Spy run later, I got this result, which means that with ram at 3200MT/s my system scored 20,985 while at 2133MT/s it scored 20,164 so there is a clear difference but not as big as I thought it would.
You can see more about what happened in this side by side comparison where we can see there were performances increases throughout all of the tests, or you can have a look at the main summary in this picture.
I was really expecting to see a bigger difference and this has kind of drifted off on a tangent from the original question, but to close what I was saying about RAM the difference in speed is roughly 3200MT/s ram being around 50% faster than 2133MT/s but the difference in the actual overall speed was relatively small.
Modern PCI-e 3.0 GPUs like the RTX 30070 that I used in this Firestrike test are fast, but currently they don't max out all of the data lanes on a PCI-e 3.0 connector, I think that the performance difference between a GPU that's designed to run on PCI-e 4.0 compared to that of the same GPU running on a PCI-e 3.0 connector would be equally small.
So, it would be reasonable to ask here, why do we need PCI-e 4.0 if the difference is that small?
I think the answer has more to do with pro-users, people that use workstations where they might need a lot of devices connected to their PC, here PCI-e 4.0 will allow more devices to run at full speed without the risk of being bottlenecked by other devices that share the same data lines. In my opinion, PCI-e 4.0 is not really a consumer technology, unless you're planning on running massive 4k and 8k video workflows for hours on a daily basis.
But here is an example of 3.0 vs 4.0 with a GPU on X470 and X570 motherboards:
So, that's my analysis, let me know if you think any differently.
Oops, sorry, I said above that I did a 3d Mark Time Spy test and then ended up tresting with Firestrike, if that can be fixed and then this message can be deleted and cast away forerver....
