PCIE Gen 4.0 on X470

[JENK9NS]

Could there be bios updates to X470 motherboards to support pcie gen 4 on nvidia 30 series cards? When ryzen 3000 launched, some mobo manufacturers updated their bios to add support for pcie gen 4 nvme ssds. My understanding is that amd made manufactures take away that gen 4 support in bios updates that followed, likely to better market the x570 boards for supporting pcie gen 4. I have an x470 crosshair vii. I’d like to buy a 30 series gpu, but if theres double digit performance bottleneck on pcie gen 3, it doesn’t make as much sense to upgrade unless i also upgrade to x570 platform.

[Hako]

It’s highely likely that whatever NVIDIA 3xxx card you put in you won’t be bottlenecked by PCIe Gen 3.
On some motherboards it may be possible to get a BIOS update that could enabled it, but not on most as the signal integrity for PCIe 4.0 is harder to achieve than with Gen 3, so no you won’t get an update to Gen 4 with X470 as it cannot bu guaranteed that it will be stable.

[anon89476829]

I wanted to add that the penalty for using PCIe 4.0 x8 instead of PCIe 4.0 x16 is small, as far as I remember even using PCIe 3.0 x8 istead of PCIe 3.0 x16 is not that huge of a deal.

Using PCIe 3.0 x16 is pretty equivalent to using PCIe 4.0 x8 from the maximal throughput you can achieve, so I guess even with a high end next gen Nvidia CPU you won’t see a big performance penalty.

Edit: As you can see in the PCI Express Wikipedia article with each new generation of PCIe the transfer speeds double. Which means PCIe 3.0 x16 is pretty much the same speed as PCIe 4.0 x8.