Intel Comet Lake-S CPUs and Z490 boards support PCI-E 4.0 (but it's not active)
A new report on the web indicates that the upcoming Comet Lake-S processors (tenth generation of Intel Core for desktop) actually do support PCI Express 4.0, some Z490 motherboards are designed for it as well. However an issue prevents PCIe 4.0 to become usable, so the platform will support PCI-E 3.0 instead.
The reason behind this is presence of Jitter in the Z490 chipset signal, that causes instability in the data signal and that menas that specifications required for the PCI-Express 4.0 certification are simply not met. PCI-E 4.0 is working at very high frequencies, and that requires that the signal be completely clean.
Several manufacturers added external clock generators to eliminate this Jitter, however not everyone did, so Intel made the decision to not support PCI-E 4.0 on this new platform.
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Senior Member
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Is not about videocards, but about lines availability.
If pciEx4 is double fast than 3, i can use 8 line instead of 16 on a pci express 4.0 video card, get the performance of 3.0 at 16x. Use the free 8 lines for something else ( another nvme for example, a fast one )
exactly. and if that nvme is also pcie 4.0, along with the gpu you can do tons of work in little time
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Just wait until nVidia announces their new generation Ampere, or 3000 series or whatever the name is and it will be PCIe 4.0 cards.
And AMD's RDNA(2) products will obviously be 4.0 as well.
No-one in their right minds would buy Z490 to willingly give up performance on their shiny new latest generation GPUs... especially considering that AMD's next gen with even more IPC and probably more clocks as well is basically just 6-7 months away from release.
How could they (Intel) screw this up so badly !?
Senior Member
Posts: 5640
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Is not about videocards, but about lines availability.
If pciEx4 is double fast than 3, i can use 8 line instead of 16 on a pci express 4.0 video card, get the performance of 3.0 at 16x. Use the free 8 lines for something else ( another nvme for example, a fast one )
It only works that way if the device itself is PCIe 4.0 compatible. A 3.0 card in a 4.0 slot is still only going to operate at 3.0 speeds.
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maybe at gen 5.0 we will finally have enough lanes that we can spare some for 10g ethernet, and phones will be doing 50gbit lifi by then
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for games, sure.
but if you're a content creator the future is now. remember time = money, now leverage threadripper 3/ ryzen 2 with (most likely an Instinct) a pcie 4.o gpu and you're saving days of work in a week.