I'm building my first PC and have a bit of a dilemma regarding my setup. I have an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D processor, a GIGABYTE X870E AORUS ELITE WIFI7 motherboard, and a 16GB ZOTAC GEFORCE RTX 5080 graphics card. Additionally, I plan on using three 1TB M.2 SSDs. However, I've learned that using certain SSD slots on this motherboard shares PCIe lanes with the GPU. This means my GPU would run at PCIe 5.0 x8 instead of x16.
From my research, it seems like the performance difference between x16 and x8 is minimal, falling within the margin of error during benchmarks. I'm curious if anyone has experience with this situation. Should I remove some SSDs to let the GPU run at full x16, or is having the extra SSD storage worth the trade-off of running the GPU at x8? Any insights would be greatly appreciated!
3 Answers
The performance drop for a card like the 5090 is about 1% at x8 compared to x16. Your 5080 will perform even better, likely seeing negligible impact. It's primarily about how demanding your games are; most of the time, the extra lanes hardly change anything for mid-range cards like the 5080. I'd say keep your SSDs for the extra space!
Honestly, it probably won't matter much for your setup. PCIe 5.0 x8 offers bandwidth equivalent to PCIe 4.0 x16, which should be more than enough for your 5080. Even with a higher-tier card like the 5090, the performance drop going from 5.0 x16 to 5.0 x8 is barely noticeable. If you need the extra storage from all three SSDs, go ahead and keep them!
I appreciate that! I watched some videos stating PCIe 4.0 x16 performs similarly to PCIe 5.0 x8, so that helps. I’m not a hardcore gamer, but I didn't want to hold back performance. I think I’ll keep all the SSDs since storage is key for me.
The overhead from PCIe communication is pretty low compared to rendering performance. If you need to utilize your drives for storage, definitely keep them active! You might miss out on a few frames while gaming, but having more space might be worth it.
Totally makes sense. Extra space will definitely benefit my gaming and storage needs more than a minor performance hit. Thanks for the advice!
Thanks for that insight! So, the 5080's drop is due to it being less powerful than the 5090? I plan to keep all my SSDs for sure, can't have too much space!