How did we get here

Upgrading PCs is a delicate balance of finding the right parts that work together. Sometimes, this works well, and many parts work with each other n some capacity. Some parts compliment each other very well, but some struggle mightily. One such case is an older HP Pavilion and a newer generation graphics card.

The PC in question has a Ryzen 5 4600g, 16GB of 3200MTS DDR4 memory and a 400 watt power supply that itself, was an upgrade. The Ryzen processor was one of several in AMD’s line up that handles graphics. Not in the way Intel displays basic graphics, but an actual graphics processor built in. These units were far above any Intel offering and allowed a solution without the extra cost of a dedicated card. They weren’t very powerful, but they were effective.

These Processors also worked on a PCIe 3.0 bus to operate. The Peripheral Component Interface is how the processor interacts with all of the individual parts. All of these are designed to work at certain bus speeds and the newer GPU is no different. What is different, is what bus speed the newer graphics card is designed for. PCIe 5.0.

So?

With each major iteration of the PCIe standard, the bandwidth doubles. This effectively doubling the speed that all of the components communicate. This means that the CPU that communicates at 8GT/s with PCIe 3.0 is trying to push a graphics card that is expecting 32GT/s. One fourth of the GPUs designed capability.

This simply means that the card may perform up to 50% worse in some games and applications. The video for this is here. It shows anywhere from a 20% loss in performance to around 50% compared to a system running an i5 12400 running at PCIe 5.0. The card still functions and is a huge step up from the integrated graphics from the CPU itself, but it’s not the right tool for the job.

When IS it a good idea?

It’s not necessarily a bad idea, but it’s not very effective. In most cases applications will run well, and games will perform , but a more recent platform will give significant improvement. In the case of a graphics card, newer innovations like Ray Tracing and Frame Generation will also be able to take advantage of a broader bandwidth and could add much more than the 50% loss in some cases.

With the price of DDR5 and SSD’s still out of reach to some, a good deal on a graphics card might still be of use until someone can save enough to invest in newer parts. Storage like NVMe SSDs are also affected, but the difference is not as critical as the GPU. Newer NVMe drives can reach data speeds in excess of 10,000 MB/s, significantly higher than standard SSDs.

One of the next things to test on this same platform will be the RTX 3050. That graphics card is more in line with the Pavilion’s budget and it is PCIe 4.0. When I write about it, you will find it here.