Can I use PCIE 4.0 GPU on PCIE 3.0 Mobo?

[MasudRana]

Hi I have some situation that I have Asus h110m em.2 motherboard and can not upgrade now, I have budget for gpu and want to upgrade with the latest one like

Gigabyte Radeon RX 5500 XT OC 4GB Graphics Card

link :   https://www.startech.com.bd/gigabyte-radeon-rx-5500-xt-oc-graphics-card

which is pcie 4.0. But my mobo is pcie 3.0 supported.

Can I use this gpu in this mobo? I dont have any problem if there are any bottleneck issue soon I will upgrade my pc....I just want to know is there any gaming or productivity problem? If i use this?

Thank you

[Aimi]

PCIe is backwards compatible. Your only issue is that you'd be limiting the bandwidth of the card.

[MasudRana]

2 minutes ago, Aimi said:

PCIe is backwards compatible. Your only issue is that you'd be limiting the bandwidth of the card.

Thank you for the reply. Can you please tell me what is "limiting the bandwidth of the card." what is this use for?

[Eigenvektor]

In general the PCIe generation has little influence on a GPU's performance (so far): https://www.techpowerup.com/review/pci-express-4-0-performance-scaling-radeon-rx-5700-xt/

 

The 5500 XT is a somewhat unusual exception. Because it has only 8 PCIe lanes it seems to perform noticeable better with PCIe 4.0: https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/pci-e-3-0-x8-may-not-have-enough-bandwidth-for-rx-5500-xt.262236/

 

4 minutes ago, MasudRana said:

Thank you for the reply. Can you please tell me what is "limiting the bandwidth of the card." what is this use for?

How quickly the CPU can send data to the GPU. If you read the article from the first link you'll see that the difference is usually marginal at best. But as I said, the 5500 XT seems to be an exception.

[Aimi]

3 minutes ago, MasudRana said:

Thank you for the reply. Can you please tell me what is "limiting the bandwidth of the card." what is this use for?

Bandwidth in this case would be the rate of data transfer. It's often not a noticeable impact in games, so you shouldn't worry about it too much.

[Roswell]

Don't worry about the bandwidth. A 5500 isn't going to saturate a 3.0 x16 slot.

[Dr0y]

3 hours ago, Vitamanic said:

Don't worry about the bandwidth. A 5500 isn't going to saturate a 3.0 x16 slot.

If it was an x16 card it wouldn't but it's in fact an x8 card and it gets some bandwidth limitation when using it with a pcie 3.0 in some limited use case/game ... It usually happens when the card runs out of vram and have to swap ram with the system.  In that case I would get an 8gb card as it will help limiting the memory swap thing.