I'm building a new PC with an ASUS TUF Gaming B850-E motherboard and an XFX Radeon RX 9070 XT. PCIe Gen 5 NVMe drives are noticeably more expensive than Gen 4 models, and I'm unsure whether the extra speed is useful in practice. Would a Gen 5 drive run at full speed on this motherboard, and is it worth choosing one for gaming and everyday use?
3 Answers
Gen 5 makes sense for workloads that repeatedly move enormous files, such as professional 4K or 8K video editing, large scratch-disk operations, certain workstation tasks, or some local AI workflows. If you’re mainly gaming, browsing, and using ordinary applications, you probably won’t notice the extra bandwidth. Check the motherboard manual for the exact M.2 slot capabilities and lane-sharing behavior, since the top slot may have specific requirements or affect other PCIe slots.
For gaming, I’d buy a good-value Gen 4 NVMe drive with sufficient capacity rather than paying extra for Gen 5. Game performance and loading times usually differ by only a small amount between Gen 3, Gen 4, and Gen 5 drives. Spending the money on more storage, better cooling, or another component is likely to have a more noticeable benefit.
For gaming and normal desktop use, Gen 5 is generally overkill. The advertised numbers are maximum sequential speeds, mostly relevant when moving very large files. Game loading and everyday applications usually depend more on random access, latency, and other system bottlenecks, so the real-world difference between a good Gen 4 drive and a Gen 5 drive is often tiny.
Exactly. Even the jump from a SATA SSD to NVMe can be hard to notice in ordinary applications, despite the much higher sequential bandwidth. Most consumer workloads aren’t constantly reading or writing huge sequential files.
Gen 5 drives can also run hotter, so they may need a larger heatsink and better airflow. That’s not necessarily a dealbreaker, but it’s another reason not to buy one unless the workload actually benefits from it.