I'm using a Ryzen 9 5950X with 32GB of RAM, an ASUS B550 Gaming F motherboard, and an 850W power supply. My current graphics card is an RTX 3060, and I'm looking for a worthwhile upgrade. Moving to AM5 isn't practical right now because of memory costs. The Radeon RX 9060 XT looks appealing, but since it uses PCIe 5.0 while my motherboard only supports PCIe 4.0, I'm wondering whether that would significantly reduce its performance.
3 Answers
Running a newer graphics card on PCIe 4.0 generally doesn’t cause the kind of bottleneck people worry about. Even much more powerful cards can perform well on PCIe 4.0, so an RX 9060 XT should be completely fine in your B550 system. Your power supply also has plenty of capacity, assuming it has the required connectors.
You could also consider stepping up to an RX 9070 if your budget allows. It would provide a larger performance increase, but the RX 9060 XT should still be a good fit for your current system. PCIe 4.0 is not something you need to worry about here.
PCIe 4.0 shouldn’t meaningfully limit an RX 9060 XT. The card will work normally, and you shouldn’t see a major performance drop just because the slot isn’t PCIe 5.0. Your Ryzen 9 5950X is also still a capable gaming CPU, so this is a perfectly reasonable upgrade from an RTX 3060.
Would the 9070 be a much better value, or is the 9060 XT likely to be the smarter choice for the money?