The PCI Express 2.0 standard was introduced in 2007, 3 years later (in 2010) PCI Express 3.0 appeared. I’ll briefly explain in this article how the 2.0 standard is still usable even after so many years, in most cases not requiring an UPGRADE to support the latest GPUs.
Let’s take a look at the specifications of two recent and very powerful GPUs, the GeForce GTX 1060 and GeForce GTX 960:
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The important data here to determine which PCI Express standard is most suitable is the“Memory Speed“, i.e. how fast the card can communicate with the memory.
Now let’s look at the maximum Memory Speed for the PCI Express 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 standards:
[table id=”4” /]
As we can see, the PCI Express x16 2.0 interface that supports up to 8 Gb/s is above the GTX 960’s capacity of 7 Gb/s. The GTX 1060, on the other hand, reaches the maximum throughput of the PCI Express 2.0 interface, meaning that if your application used the maximum transfer power of the GTX 1060, the PCI Express 2.0 interface would also cope perfectly.
For top-of-the-line GPUs such as the GeForce GTX 1080, this reaches 10 Gb/s, which is more than the capacity of the PCI Express x16 2.0 interface.
So for a GeForce GTX 1080 the PCI Express 3.0 interface is the most recommended?
Not necessarily. If we consider its use in Games, the vast majority of games don’t use all this transfer power, and in several benchmarks available on the internet the performance gain didn’t exceed 3%, with a negligible gain of just 3 FPS on average.
Conclusion
If you consider the UPGRADE of a motherboard with a PCI Express 3.0 interface for Games purposes only, the gain will not be significant.
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- pci express
