One of the capabilities of the newer Intel processors is their support for PCI Express 5.0, however, there are no compatible graphics cards yet, so what better than using an i9-12900K with a PCI Gen5 SSD. compatible to check hard drive transfer speed. How it works ?
It’s not news or revelation that we will have NVMe SSDs compatible with PCIe Gen 5 soon, which will mean doubling the speed at which this data is transmitted from the storage unit to the RAM and will allow for the first time to reach double digits. transfer measured in GB / s. Well, Intel has tested one of these units in its Intel Core 12 processors with the Alder Lake-S architecture, taking advantage of the driver for this interface that these processors have built in.
Test an i9-12900K with a PCI Gen5 SSD
The Intel Core 12 has 16 fifth generation PCI Express lanes, designed for the graphics card, but this can be split into 2 of the 8 lanes under the same interface. The problem? The remaining 4 lines intended to connect an NVMe SSD do so for the fourth version of the standard. However, it was not a problem for Ryan Shrout to decide to show the capabilities of this interface.
Using a Samsung PM1743 SSD, PCI Express 5.0 compatible, Ryan decided to combine it with a Core i9-12900K and got no more and no less than a 14 Gb / s transfer speed.
For this, Ryan used an ASUS ROG Maximus Z690 APEX motherboard, which has 16 and 8 PCIe Gen 5 slots. This forced him to use an adapter like the one you see in the image above to marry the SSD. PCI Gen5 with the i9-12900K in order to use these interfaces directly.
Two are always better than one
Since the adapter interface is 8 lines and the newer Intel processors support up to two simultaneous interfaces, Ryan Shrout did not need to connect back SSD PCI Gen5 al i9-12900K using two adapters, achieve a bandwidth of 28 Gb / s for the two storage units together. A figure never seen before and which allows access to data in memory beyond RAM at a transfer speed that we considered a few years ago to be worthy of the best memory for our PCs.
However, this demo only measures the copy speed and nothing else, if, for example, the data was compressed when it was copied from SSD to RAM, we have to take into account that the Intel Core 12 lack accelerators for decompressing data during the flight, so the computational load on the processor in these cases would force us to dedicate multiple cores, even powerful Intel Core 12, to this task.
Finally, this reminds us of a weak point of the Intel Core 12, the fact that the 4 lines designed for the NVMe SSD provided by the CPU are fourth and not fifth generation, which forces us to use the lines designed for graphics. card. Will Intel change this with Raptor Lake or Meteor Lake?
