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surely a shiny new pci express gen 4

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system is going to absolutely blow the doors off your old gen 3 one right

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well yes but maybe not for the reason that you would

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think MSI sponsored this video where we are going to be digging deep into the

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performance impact of turbo charging your pci express speed

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why did they sponsor that when their marketing so prominently features pci

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express gen 4 you might ask cause MSI don't give a what PCIe

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gen you buy as long as it's MSI so lol

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here we go

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if you've never heard of our Techquickie channel and you're wondering what the sun

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i think this backplate actually took the brunt of it oh nice if you've never

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heard of our Techquickie channel and you're wondering what the sam hill of pci express is the tldr is it's the

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method that modern cpus use to communicate with virtually everything

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else in your pc and the total bandwidth available to it for high speed graphics

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or storage or networking is determined by two things

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the number of lanes the CPU can allocate to a device and the speed at which those

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lanes can operate think of pci express kind of like a

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highway adding more lanes is challenging because

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it requires more interconnects which makes the components larger and more

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complex adding cost by contrast if you

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could just make all the cars drive faster that's way more economical

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as long as you can keep them from crashing so engineers at pci sig and its

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members have been working hard to improve data integrity allowing these

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pci express links or lanes to reach higher and higher clock speeds each

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generation since the first has roughly doubled the speed of each individual

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lane with pci express gen 4 offering nearly 2 gigabytes per second per lane

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that means that our featured card here an MSI GeForce rtx 3090 supreme x can be

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fed at nearly 32 gigabytes per second on

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a compliant motherboard and good thing right because it not only

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boasts the most powerful GPU on the market it's factory overclocked to boot

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so armed with only the information you have so far you'd probably think that

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pci express gen 4 is an absolute necessity for gamers and power users

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everywhere but a theory is just that a theory we need to put it to the test so

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we'll be using a ryzen 9 5950x and a top

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of the line MSI x570 godlike motherboard

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to remove as many other system bottlenecks as possible we're also going

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to throw an rx 6900xt into the mix for team red representation starting with

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NVIDIA our rtx 3090 pulls roughly the same numbers in shadow of the tomb

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raider with a slight dip in gen 3's 95th percentile minimums what that means is

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that the experience is generally the same except that when the game hitches

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or stutters it's a little bit more severe on gen 3 though

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we couldn't detect it with the human eye in this case in fact the difference wasn't much

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beyond our margin of error in any of the tests that we ran including

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forza horizon 4 f1 2020 and red dead

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redemption 2 where gen 3 frame rates are consistently a frame or two behind gen 4

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but no more where the pattern doesn't hold is in cs

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go check out that 60 FPS minimum frame rate

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drop and 50 FPS average loss for

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whatever reason this game seems to absolutely hammer the pci express bus

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compared to other newer titles that we tested so the faster these transfers can

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happen the better on AMD the story is much the same shadow

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of the tomb raider doesn't see any variation and we're only a frame off in

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forza horizon 4. f1 2020 and red dead redemption 2 also show only a modest

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difference on gen 4 versus gen 3 but then again

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look at those cs go scores we've gone from over 400 FPS average with gen 4 to

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just 311 in gen 3. that's a difference

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of almost 30 percent from these results then it's clear that these kinds of

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gains are rare but they are out there if

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you're running the right applications also we expect this speed to become more

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important as direct storage makes its way into pc games

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if you haven't heard of direct storage it is functionally similar to the way

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that the playstation 5 and the xbox series is allow the graphics chip to

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bypass other system bottlenecks and directly access your game storage drive

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for faster loading times and sony says with their implementation even real-time

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asset streaming that's still a ways off on the pc though so in the meantime is

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there anything that can reliably push gen 4 today

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productivity maybe on the NVIDIA side it starts out pretty

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bleak blender sees only a modest improvement in cuda mode while optics is

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a complete wash but then we quickly found an improvement in v-ray where we

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saw measurable bumps in both cuda and rtx enabled workflows davinci resolve

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too gives us a modest little performance increase and the same is true for adobe

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photoshop although that last one in particular was somewhat unexpected

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things start to peter out again with luxmark4 though where we're looking at a

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roughly three percent improvement and octane bench doesn't meaningfully

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improve at all as for spec view perf 2020 most of this is so close that we

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might as well call it a tie outside of maya's stand out

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one percent increase over gen 3. moving over to AMD the blender opencl result is

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basically the same between gen 3 and gen 4 but unlike NVIDIA davinci resolve and

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adobe photoshop don't see a major improvement in performance either

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curiously though where NVIDIA stumbled at luxmark AMD shines with a hefty 27

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improvement in the food render and eleven percent in the hall bench that is

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definitely nothing to sneeze at if you use lux core renderer

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finally spec view perf brings AMD back to

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they're the same picture territory with little to show for the extra bandwidth

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that gen 4 offers again maya stands out as

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maybe slightly better but it's nothing that you're going to want to replace your motherboard for these numbers both

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agree with and also contradict some of the earlier results found not only by us

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when we reviewed the Radeon rx 5700 series but also by gamersnexus who did a

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full video on gen4 performance back in september what this shows us is that

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there's been some quiet movement between then and now with advances in CPU

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performance on the platforms that support gen 4 perhaps being the biggest

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we used a ryzen 5950x today that is a

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significantly faster CPU than the 3900x

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that we used last time and the 3900xt that gamersnexus used in their video so

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could it be that Intel's upcoming rocket lake cpus could hold the key to even

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better gen 4 performance we will be checking it out so get

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subscribed to make sure you don't miss it whatever Intel has up its sleeve

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though pci express gen 4 and up for that matter really weren't made for consumers

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anyway at least not directly i mean it's

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great for hooking up more devices to a motherboard chipset a faster link here

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means faster storage ports faster network ports more usb ports etc etc

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but for most people the benefit of gen 4 is pretty small compared to simply

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having a faster CPU it's just that you can't really get a faster CPU without

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going gen 4. no the real reason pci express keeps getting faster is because

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of the data center and then we just get their trickle-down technology

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in a data center it's not so that they can just

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shove faster devices into their racks i mean that is a thing but it's more about

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being able to shove more devices into them and using features like bifurcation

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and devices like pci express switches to

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split the lanes if you've got faster lanes you not only

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can have faster devices for the same number of lanes you can have more

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devices with the same number of lanes without sacrificing the speed that you

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already have incidentally that's exactly what we're doing with our high speed

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NVMe storage server we've got a gen 4 carrier card that has eight gen 3 ssds

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on it running at full speed if we put that card into a gen 3 slot they would

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end up being bottlenecked because natively that slot only has enough lanes

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for four ssds which actually got us thinking

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what if i'm not just a gamer what if i want to use my system as a workstation

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by day and gaming rig by night and plug in like two graphics cards for some

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heavy workloads ah okay

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so some motherboards like our MSI x570 godlike are capable of bifurcating pci

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express lanes that means they can take a 16 lane slot like this one up here and

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split those lanes out to multiple physical slots allowing more than one

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device to share the bandwidth that otherwise would have gone to a single

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device to find out if this helps we installed a second rtx 3090 in our

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system and ran our benchmarks at least the ones that benefit from dual GPU in

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gen 3 and gen 4 modes again

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and turns out that there's not much benefit

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here right now either the few benchmarks where there were

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improvements with gen 4 were v-ray by about two or three percent and luxmark

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by about a single percentage point that's it a little anticlimactic but if

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you think about it these kinds of workloads aren't going to scale linearly

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in terms of bandwidth required anyway and where we'd be more likely to see a

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significant improvement is in crunching deep learning data sets but

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that's a workload that does skew quite a bit closer to the data center than to

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the desktop also in the data center they might have quite a lot more than two

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devices per 16 lanes anyway don't fret

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it took a while for gen 3 to be fully utilized when that took over from gen 2

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as well so now that AMD has had a generation of support and Intel is

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bringing it with their upcoming rocket lake cpus we are headed in the right

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direction just in time for direct storage to start making proper use of it

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we hope and besides a few percent improvement is

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nothing to sneeze at you start with some

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gen 4 PCIe toss in some resizable bar

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support sprinkle on faster RAM and a pinch of community optimizations and all

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of a sudden you've got a pretty compelling generational upgrades so you

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know what i say keep it coming just like i keep the sponsors coming big

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thanks to MSI for providing us all the equipment and sponsoring this deep dive

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into pci express gen 3 vs gen 4 performance go check them out we used

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their top end stuff here but their gaming x trio cards are also great for

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performance and they have a wide range of motherboards x570 b550 to satisfy

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your ryzen fix oh and of course their z490 boards are already wired for gen 4

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when rocket lake launches so we're going to have all that linked down below

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thanks for watching guys if you enjoyed this one maybe go check out our video on

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the server that liquid sent us for a taste of just how fast pci express can

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go when you load it up with enough devices