PCI Express 4.0 will mean the end for GPU power cables

Somehow I missed the news on the PCI Express 4.0 specification announcement and by the looks of it they are not only going to increase the transfer speed but also the wattage output from 74w to over 300w which brings up some interesting questions.

First would be, how is this going to change motherboard layout?  For instance current video cards require around 300w of extra power just for the GPU.  While it would be nice to pull this from the 24pin power connector there is a reason we have an 8pin CPU power connector right next to the VRM. 

So, if you think about it instead of having the PCI Express power going directly to the video card it will connect directly to the motherboard and then be required for EVERY card you plug into the system.  I'm not sure we are really solving anything by doing this.

Likewise I would be concerned about corrosion on the PCI Express slot pins and how that will impact extreme overclocking and those living in high humidly areas of the world.

The previous iterations of the connection have prepared us for an expected doubling of available bandwidth across the interface. From PCIe 1.0 we’ve seen an effective doubling of peak bandwidth from each successive generation - starting at 250MB/s for a x1 connection and moving up to a little under 2GB’s for PCIe 4.0. That means for a full x16 socket then your PCIe 4.0 GPU is going to have a total of 31.508GB/s of available bandwidth at its disposal. 

While those are pretty numbers for the numerologically-obsessed the ones that have really got my attention have come from a report on Tom’s Hardware. They spoke to Richard Solomon, vice president of the PCI-SIG, about the potential power delivery from the new PCIe 4.0 slots: off the top of his head he couldn’t give the final proposed upper limit for socket power, but said the minimum would be at least 300W. He also stated that members of the PCI-SIG had suggested several options and that maybe even 400W or 500W could be possible from a single PCIe 4.0 socket.

It will be interesting to see how this all plays out and if it creates more problems than it solves.  With that said, rumors claim we will be able to see PCIe 4.0 it in action later this year.

Related Web URL: http://www.pcgamesn.com/pcie-4-release-date