Why there are not many PCIe Gen 4 add-in cards available yet?

[Chiyawa]

Hi,

 

Well, I'm searching for some PCIe add in card in Amazon, and I'm still surprise there are virtually not many PCIe add in cards (be it Ethernet card or USB card) uses PCIe Gen4. I'm looking to get like USB-C 3.2 gen 2 expansion  card running PCIe Gen 4 x1 or 10GbE Ethernet card running on PCIe Gen 4 x1 card. Most still use PCIe Gen3 x4 cards. PCIe Gen4 appears in the market for quite some time now, and I think that we need to take advantage of the technology that it can offer.

 

Now, I know that only X570 motherboard offers PCIe Gen 4 connection to all of its slots, whereas most chipset still offers Gen 3.

 

Still quite a bummer, but I hope manufacturer could release PCIe Gen 4 cards soon. PCIe Gen 4 x1 slot can theoretically provide 15.75Gbps (should be enough for USB3.2 Gen 2 type C or 10GbE Ethernet port).

 

Regards,

Chiyawa

[Xaring]

Gen 4 has a incredibly large bandwidth and its somewhat complex to implement (both board and card side).
Unless the device needs the extra bandwidth, like GPUs or NVME SSDs, theres no point in having the extra complexity for literally no benefit.

[Chiyawa]

1 hour ago, Xaring said:

Unless the device needs the extra bandwidth, like GPUs or NVME SSDs, theres no point in having the extra complexity for literally no benefit.

I see. Anyway, I do have 2 PCIe x1 slot and I thought they can be used to connect to PCIe peripherals such as 10GbE ethernet. I only have 1 PCIe x16 slot (that runs on x4) and it was populated with an SAS card. My integrated LAN port is only GbE and I'm thinking of getting a 10GbE card. It's available, but only in x4 card. I have an empty x8 slot, but if I populate it, my RX Vega 64 GPU will going to run at x8 only, and not to mention I may be going to add another GPU in near future.

 

Sadly, the PCIe x1 slots are not open end, meaning you can't fit an x4 card into it unless you saw out some pins.

[Xaring]

8 minutes ago, Chiyawa said:

I see. Anyway, I do have 2 PCIe x1 slot and I thought they can be used to connect to PCIe peripherals such as 10GbE ethernet. I only have 1 PCIe x16 slot (that runs on x4) and it was populated with an SAS card. My integrated LAN port is only GbE and I'm thinking of getting a 10GbE card. It's available, but only in x4 card. I have an empty x8 slot, but if I populate it, my RX Vega 64 GPU will going to run at x8 only, and not to mention I may be going to add another GPU in near future.

 

Sadly, the PCIe x1 slots are not open end, meaning you can't fit an x4 card into it unless you saw out some pins.

PCI 4.0 is generally only implemented in the top 16x PCI-E slot - ymmv - so it would be strange for any other slot to be 4.0 anyways.
If your GPU is on the top slot, which would be 4.0, you'd still have the same bandwidth as a PCI-E 3.0 x16 slot - there would be virtually no performance loss. (GPUs can barely squeeze 3.0 max bandwidth currently on the top tier cards - so older gen cards won't have any issue. 
 

[Chiyawa]

1 hour ago, Xaring said:

PCI 4.0 is generally only implemented in the top 16x PCI-E slot

I'm using X570 motherboard, so all the PCIe slots are capable to run Gen 4 speed.

 

1 hour ago, Xaring said:

GPUs can barely squeeze 3.0 max bandwidth currently on the top tier cards - so older gen cards won't have any issue. 

Yeah, for gaming, I think you don't need that high bandwidth, but for rendering, I found that running x8 significantly increase the rendering time of my project by about 6 or 7%, but it may be because the workload is slightly different.

[Xaring]

23 minutes ago, Chiyawa said:

Yeah, for gaming, I think you don't need that high bandwidth, but for rendering, I found that running x8 significantly increase the rendering time of my project by about 6 or 7%, but it may be because the workload is slightly different.

Oh! That makes sense.
Then im afraid you're gonna have to sacrifice somewhere or another

If you're gonna set up a 10Gbps networks, you might as well get rid of the SAS card and set up an NAS in that same network, kind of how LMG does it with their servers. That way you will have the bandwidth and you can double up on the data security/backup.

Now that i realize it, your GPU isn't PCI-E 4.0, so it will be running on x8 3.0, not 4.0 - that would explain the performance loss.

Also, if my knowledge doesn't fail me, 10Gbps (Gbe) networking is capable of about 1GB/s - so worse case scenario, as little as a PCI 3.0 x2  (1.8 GT/s) interface should be plenty bandwidth.

Edit: Amazon proves me right https://www.amazon.com/StarTech-com-Express-Gigabit-Ethernet-ST10000SPEX/dp/B00LPRS36K

[Chiyawa]

5 minutes ago, Xaring said:

Also, if my knowledge doesn't fail me, 10Gbps (Gbe) networking is capable of about 1GB/s - so worse case scenario, as little as a PCI 3.0 x2  (1.8 GT/s) interface should be plenty bandwidth.

It is. The problem is that I don't have PCIe slots that can accommodate x4 cards. The PCIe x1 slot my motherboard has doesn't have an opening to accommodate longer cards (x2 or more).

 

7 minutes ago, Xaring said:

If you're gonna set up a 10Gbps networks, you might as well get rid of the SAS card and set up an NAS in that same network, kind of how LMG does it with their servers. That way you will have the bandwidth and you can double up on the data security/backup.

Hmm... Good idea, though that means I would have to shelf out some more money for external enclosure or probably a new system. Still, I think it's a viable solution.

 

9 minutes ago, Xaring said:

Also, if my knowledge doesn't fail me, 10Gbps (Gbe) networking is capable of about 1GB/s - so worse case scenario, as little as a PCI 3.0 x2  (1.8 GT/s) interface should be plenty bandwidth.

Yeah, that's why you don't really need PCIe gen3 x4 to run a single port 10GbE Ethernet, but if you have 2 ports, then you really need x4. Actually, I saw some of the 10GbE NIC card that uses x4 card is because they can be used in PCIe gen 2 system as well. This allows a very old computer to fully utilised the 10GbE NIC card without losing performance.

[Xaring]

4 hours ago, Chiyawa said:

It is. The problem is that I don't have PCIe slots that can accommodate x4 cards. The PCIe x1 slot my motherboard has doesn't have an opening to accommodate longer cards (x2 or more).

 

Hmm... Good idea, though that means I would have to shelf out some more money for external enclosure or probably a new system. Still, I think it's a viable solution.

 

Yeah, that's why you don't really need PCIe gen3 x4 to run a single port 10GbE Ethernet, but if you have 2 ports, then you really need x4. Actually, I saw some of the 10GbE NIC card that uses x4 card is because they can be used in PCIe gen 2 system as well. This allows a very old computer to fully utilised the 10GbE NIC card without losing performance.

Worse case scenario you might wanna break down a x16 slot on 2x8 or 4x4 with one of these things (https://www.amazon.com/Supermicro-RSC-R2UT-2E8R-RISER-PASSIVE-2-PCIE/dp/B0037KAE2O/ref=sr_1_19?dchild=1&keywords=pci-e+to+pci-e+riser&qid=1623689951&sr=8-19 - Just find the one that fits best for your needs)

Its gonna be fuggly as fuck inside that case but oh well, it should work XD

For a NAS, you can probably use that same SAS card on a cheapo 2nd hand system you can find somewhere.

Also, maybe setting up 2,5Gb instead of 10Gb would be cheaper, if you wanna save up a bit.

[Chiyawa]

8 hours ago, Xaring said:

For a NAS, you can probably use that same SAS card on a cheapo 2nd hand system you can find somewhere.

Yeah. I mean, I can always look for old Dell PowerEdge or something.

 

8 hours ago, Xaring said:

Also, maybe setting up 2,5Gb instead of 10Gb would be cheaper, if you wanna save up a bit.

That's also a viable option. But still, having a 10GbE network card is much better because of the speed. I already recently purchase a network switch that has 2 ports support 10GbE network and 8 ports support 1GbE network.

 

8 hours ago, Xaring said:

Worse case scenario you might wanna break down a x16 slot on 2x8 or 4x4 with one of these things

I see. Although my motherboard has 2 PCIe x16 slot that connected to the CPU. If I populate only one card at x16 slot, I get full 16 lanes. But If I populate 2, then each slot will only run on 8 lanes.

 

 

Anyway, the truth is, I'm trying to make my rig into a server / gaming rig hybrid. I have bought an SAS card and configured 4 SAS drives and those will serve as storage server. Currently, with 1GbE network, I found that the connection is quickly congested when more than 3 devices access at the same time. So I'm thinking of to get a 10GbE network preferably in PCIe Gen 4 x1 card (since I have 2 slots available) to fix the issue, but most cards I found are in PCIe Gen 3 x4 card which does not fit PCIe x1 slot.