I'm considering upgrading to an RTX 5070, but my motherboard is quite outdated. How much of a performance hit should I expect by using this PCIe 5.0 graphics card in my old PCIe 3.0 x16 slot? Would my older CPU make this even worse?
5 Answers
I recall Gamers Nexus actually tested this scenario - they compared performance scaling from PCIe 3 to PCIe 5. It’s worth checking out if you want more detailed insights.
If I remember right, the bus size and the lack of features like resizable BAR on PCIe 3.0 setups matter more. But some lower-end AMD 6000 series GPUs had issues in this area.
You'll probably experience a maximum of 5% performance loss, especially if you have enough VRAM. Running out of VRAM while gaming could impact performance much more than the PCIe version.
You might see around a 2% decrease in performance. However, don’t forget that an old motherboard likely means an outdated CPU too, which could cause a bigger bottleneck overall.
In terms of theoretical throughput, you might lose 75%, but in practical terms, the real performance impact is likely to be under 10%.
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