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I'm thinking of building a new PC, and I'm wondering about this. I want to buy ASRock RX 5500 XT 8G, which has PCIe 4.0. The thing is that motherboards with PCIe 4.0 support are quite expensive, when there are some good motherboards such as ASUS A320-M that have PCIe 3.0

My question is: is such a GPU worth it if the motherboard doesn't support PCIe 4.0? I know that there are no compatibility issues, but I want to know if that GPU is worth the money if one will not be able to exploit PCIe 4.0 features. Namely, maybe there are other GPUs that are much cheaper and would perform in a similar fashion because of the bottleneck the motherboard would impose to the RX5500XT.

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    TomsHardware tested performance at various PCIe versions with a motherboard that could change its functional version in the BIOS. There was not much difference. It was a few years ago, but you can see it at the link below. Try googling "actual performance test different pci versions" . tomshardware.com/reviews/… Jul 15, 2020 at 0:37

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After a quick Google search, I found this article which explains that:

a PCIe 4.0 x16 slot can theoretically hit approximately 32 gigabytes per second (GB/s) of data flowing in each direction, while PCIe 3.0 maxed out around, you guessed it, 16GB/s

Given your graphics card's specs, the max speed is 14 Gbps, which is well within the reach of what PCIe 3.0 can handle. They also just specify that it does have "PCIe 4.0 support" which to me suggests that they're not insisting you must have it, but instead that you could take advantage of it. I suspect that PCIe 4.0 may become more relevant if you are trying to significantly overclock your graphics card. If you purchase a PCIe 4.0 motherboard, you could also expect "better signal reliability and integrity for improved performance". But again, PCIe 3.0 cards are more than good enough currently.

At the end of the day, you probably won't notice the difference very often between using this card in a PCIe 3.0 board versus a PCIe 4.0 board, so while you shouldn't purchase it solely because it supports PCIe 4.0, it will perform just fine on your motherboard.

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