I'm in the process of upgrading my setup, last time being around 2020. With rising prices for memory and storage, I want to stick with my 2TB Gen 3x4 NVMe SSD. I know it's backwards compatible, but I'm curious if using this SSD will affect my GPU's performance. For context, I have an ITX build with an ASUS ROG Strix B850i. Any insights would be appreciated!
4 Answers
It depends on what you mean by performance. If we're talking gaming, there's basically no difference compared to Gen 4 or 5. Even older SATA SSDs run games without issues. But for heavy tasks like video editing or transferring large files, you might notice some differences.
No way! Your GPU performance won't be affected at all. For gaming, SSD speeds and the PCIe 3.0 generation don’t really make a difference. You'll be just fine sticking with your Gen 3x4 NVMe.
Absolutely none at all! I’ve been around the block, and I can tell you for sure, there's no impact.
You won't see any hit in performance. When it comes to loading times for games, the difference is usually in milliseconds, which doesn't impact gameplay. There might be a minor hit in cases where games can use direct storage, but hardly any games do this, so it likely won’t make a noticeable difference.

Yeah, I'm mostly gaming but I do some light video editing in DaVinci. Good to know about the SSD performance in that case.