[SOLVED] Intel with PCIe 4.0 - To Wait or Not to Wait?

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Crag_Hack

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Dec 25, 2015
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I am going to buy a new Intel (probably Intel - like that 9700k) system soon. Just wandering if it would be prudent to postpone until Intel supports PCIe 4.0. Comet Lake desktop reportedly isn't correct? What is the ETA for Comet Lake? If it doesn't support PCIe 4.0 I assume I'd be waiting even longer for 4.0 support. Do graphics cards even use all the bandwidth of the PCIe bus such that it would matter? For PCIe M.2 SSDs could I install them in an addon card that operates on a PCIe 3.0 x8 slot to attain their maximum bandwidth? Maybe I should just go with AMD... Anything else to know?
 
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Darkbreeze
Don't wait. There are no PCIe 4.0 devices that are either worth it, or show any kind of performance gains over existing devices, because existing devices don't even saturate the 3.0 bus as it is. That could change at some point down the road, but IMO that won't be for a good long while and there is no point in even buying into an X570 board, which has PCI 4.0 NOW, either. Nothing so far has shown it to benefit users at all. Not graphics. Not storage. Until there is a full solution that includes devices AND board/CPU support, with proof that there is a tangible improvement, I would definitely not use that as my measuring stick when it comes to deciding what hardware I want to go with.

In the back of your mind, as a measure to offset...
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Don't wait. There are no PCIe 4.0 devices that are either worth it, or show any kind of performance gains over existing devices, because existing devices don't even saturate the 3.0 bus as it is. That could change at some point down the road, but IMO that won't be for a good long while and there is no point in even buying into an X570 board, which has PCI 4.0 NOW, either. Nothing so far has shown it to benefit users at all. Not graphics. Not storage. Until there is a full solution that includes devices AND board/CPU support, with proof that there is a tangible improvement, I would definitely not use that as my measuring stick when it comes to deciding what hardware I want to go with.

In the back of your mind, as a measure to offset against the possibility that it might come in a year or two, perhaps, and if so, then X570 would be the way to go right now, but honestly I don't see it coming to fruition in a timely enough fashion to even make X570 worth paying extra for.
 
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Crag_Hack said:
Don't the PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSDs have higher sequential read/write? I'm guessing there's no practical benefit to that for a gamer...
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If you are copying a large block of sequential data between TWO high end M.2 PCIe 4.0 drives...then you might see a benafit.

For a game system? You'd be hard pressed to see any difference over a typical SATA III 2.5" drive, much less PCIe 3.4 vs 4.0.

Don't wait.
 
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Crag_Hack said:
So like if you're loading a level that's 5 GB it's gonna load so fast in the first place that it doens't really matter?
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"a level" is not a single file of 5GB.
It is dozens, hundreds, sometimes thousands of little tiny files totaling 5GB.

HDD-> SATA SSD - Big difference
SATA III SSD -> PCIe 3.0/NVMe drive - Slightly faster, but much smaller difference. If at all.
PCIe 3.0->PCIe 4.0 - In a blind test, you wouldn't know the difference.


That big number you see advertised all over is for sequential data. Large blocks of data, all neatly in a row.
Real world (your game level) is not like that.

SSD's benefit over spinning HDD's in their near zero access time. ALL SSD's.
Don't get all googly eyed over that big magic number.
 
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Is the only regular activity a gamer/enthusiast might engage in to realize the benefits of larger sequentials image backups from and to those pcie4 guys? Any other activities? Also with regard to graphics cards any vague estimate of when we might realize the benefits of pcie4? Is it far enough in the future that it totally doesn't bear any relevance? Thanks for letting me pick your brain :)
 
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Crag_Hack said:
I am going to buy a new Intel (probably Intel - like that 9700k) system soon. Just wandering if it would be prudent to postpone until Intel supports PCIe 4.0. Comet Lake desktop reportedly isn't correct? What is the ETA for Comet Lake? If it doesn't support PCIe 4.0 I assume I'd be waiting even longer for 4.0 support. Do graphics cards even use all the bandwidth of the PCIe bus such that it would matter? For PCIe M.2 SSDs could I install them in an addon card that operates on a PCIe 3.0 x8 slot to attain their maximum bandwidth? Maybe I should just go with AMD... Anything else to know?
Click to expand...

The few circumstances that you’d benefit from PCIe 4.0 would be: when setting up a RAID-0 configuration using multiple high speed SSDs (M.2 NVMe or even Intel Optane); or when using multiple graphics cards.

I’m talking about super high speed PCs.
For regular users, it won’t make any difference. We’re not even saturating the PCIe 3.0 yet!
 
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Yes, to see full sequential speeds, from ANY kind of SSD, both sources need to be the same speed (Or one of them even be faster) AND it needs to be large single files. As mentioned, 10GB of 5-50mb files isn't going to have sustained speeds that are anywhere near spec. You can't even expect game files that are loading to do that because, as also mentioned, those will consist of a whole bunch of small files. There are few use cases where you could expect to see anything like even 75% of sequential speed realized. Most often, it would be more like 10% of that speed, given those astronomical numbers.
 
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Crag_Hack said:
Also with regard to graphics cards any vague estimate of when we might realize the benefits of pcie4? Is it far enough in the future that it totally doesn't bear any relevance?
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While it's impossible to say for sure, it will probably be a number of years. The highest-end graphics cards have only recently begun to show a measurable performance impact from running on a PCIe 2.0 x16 connection, despite PCIe 3.0 having been available on mainstream systems since 2012. And with a mid-range graphics card, you still wouldn't see any meaningful hit to performance from running it in a 2.0 x16 slot. Since 3.0 offers double the bandwidth, I think we can safely assume that the added bandwidth of 4.0 probably won't be relevant to graphics cards for some years to come, even at the high-end, unless something were to drastically change with the design of graphics cards. I suspect that other parts of the system would be holding back performance more than the PCIe connection by that point.

For storage, as has been said, even if a PCIe 4.0 SSD can technically push higher sequential numbers, the real-world performance benefits are likely to be quite minimal in most scenarios. As far as game load times are concerned, fast NVMe SSDs tend to only be around 10% faster at loading today's games compared to SATA SSDs, despite technically being capable of providing multiple times the performance, so the additional benefits of a 4.0 drive seem questionable at this time. A lot of this comes down to the fact that the system is not just loading the data off the drive, but also processing that data in various ways, so the drive itself often isn't what's limiting performance. I wouldn't necessarily say that will always be the case though. Current games are designed with hard drives in mind, but as SSDs become the norm in systems and consoles, we may start to see games designed in ways that make better use of their higher transfer rates. Again, the near-term benefits of PCIe 4.0 are likely to be minimal though, so I wouldn't hold off on buying a system just for that.

One thing I might point out though, is that Intel may be increasing thread counts with next-year's processors, to be more competitive with what AMD is currently offering in terms of multithreaded performance. Rumors suggest that they may be enabling SMT (Hyperthreading) across their lineup for their 10th-gen Core desktop processors, whereas only i9s feature it in their current generation, with the i7s trading it for two more cores compared to the prior gen. If that happens, the next i7s should perform similar to the current i9s, the next i5s like the current i7s, and the next i3s like the current i5s, much like what we saw when Coffee Lake launched two years ago. So, it could potentially be worth waiting for that if you want to go the Intel route, even if PCIe 4.0 probably isn't going to be a big selling point.
 
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Yes, anything that is "this gen" is very unlikely to see much in the way of discounts. Usually, it's whatever is left over in the warehouse from "last years " "this gen" products that are now superseded by something else. There are exceptions of course, but not many. You might find some good deals on memory, and drives and possibly even graphics cards, but motherboards and CPUs are unlikely to be heavily discounted because they are already in demand and hard to find in stock so retailers know they don't have to discount them to sell them and since there are no immediately looming new releases on the horizon that make it imperative to deplete stock on current offerings, they can afford to ask normal market prices and sit on it because there are plenty of buyers right now.

Many of the most popular AMD and Intel CPUs have been hard to actually GET, even if you had the cash in hand, and the same goes for many of the B450 and X470 motherboards, and even many of the Z370/390 boards. So, it's worth waiting to see, because you never know, but I wouldn't "count" on it being likely you'll save big on the big ticket stuff.

Unless your big ticket stuff is tv's and headphones.
 
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About “Black Friday” discounts...

I don’t know how things go in the USA, but in my country, shops tend to raise the prices 10%~30% one month before Black Friday, so they can put it back down at the original price and call it “HUGE DISCOUNTS” - “30% OFF” 🤣
 
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Thanks so much everybody for your time. I have one last question - Comet Lake; to wait or not to wait? Performance gain on an i7 flagship would be measurable but not groundbreaking from Coffee Lake refresh to Comet Lake right? Also on initial release the price would be high and availability low right? Ultimately you could wait forever since things never stop improving and you would never have the best :)
 
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Exactly. Waiting for ever is a fool's endgame. Waiting for a SPECIFIC platform, isn't, necessarily. Sometimes waiting bites us in the buttocks though. If you NEED the upgrade now, do it now. If you don't, then wait. I'm waiting to see if perhaps Intel offers a ten core no hyperthreading model. If they do, I will likely go that way. If not, I will likely go with a Ryzen 7 3700x unless there is something else compelling about the Intel Comet lake platform. I need an upgrade and am tired of waiting, but it getting close enough to the point where something better might be coming soon that I am still content to wait for it, for now.
 
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Darkbreeze said:
Actually, they tend to do it two or three months in advance, so that everybody forgets that the price during black friday sales is the same as it was before the hike by the time it comes along. LOL.
Click to expand...

I’ve been searching for this item on eMag shop: SSD Samsung 970 Pro 1TB.
At the beginning of October, the price was: 1335 Lei (314.1 $).
Now, one month later, the price is: 1562 Lei (367.5 $).

They’ll put it back at the innitial price and call it:
“BLACK FRIDAY PRICES!!!
30% OFF”
😂😂😂
 
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Endre said:
I don’t know how things go in the USA, but in my country, shops tend to raise the prices 10%~30% one month before Black Friday, so they can put it back down at the original price and call it “HUGE DISCOUNTS” - “30% OFF” 🤣
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I think this is kind of the case in the US too. There isn't necessarily a huge increase in price, but the lowest sale prices often tend to not be quite as good.

Crag_Hack said:
Performance gain on an i7 flagship would be measurable but not groundbreaking from Coffee Lake refresh to Comet Lake right?
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Again, it looks like they'll probably be adding more threads at each product level. I wouldn't expect that to make much of a difference for current games at the i7 level, but additional threads could potentially allow the next generation of games to run smoother, if you plan on keeping the system for a number of years. And again, it's worth pointing out that if the next i5's offer multithreaded performance comparable to the current i7's, you could go that route and put the $100 saved toward something like graphics hardware, which will likely have a much larger impact on gaming performance.
 
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AoyD said:
OMG,!...
There is very fast M.2 PCI-E 4.0, 5000 MBytes/sec
works in full speed on PCI-E 4.0 only
SO Answer is YES there is Benefit and YES there is DEVICES 4.0
OS runs faster, Big Games loads faster, also copying files much faster

https://www.gigabyte.com/Solid-State-Drive/AORUS-NVMe-Gen4-SSD-1TB#kf

INTEL is Just SLOW at this moment
Go to AMD
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Care to give us some actual numbers about "big games loads faster" ?

SATA III vs PCI-E 3.0 vs PCI-E 4.0.

Which drives, what game, what level, and how much 'faster'...
Not just the big sequential number in the advertising and spec sheet...actual user facing results.
 
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