FUTURE PROOFING PICKS

So, you’ve seen our two builds, looked at the parts, and wondered about the future. After all, investing in a rig like this is usually going to future-proof you for the next five years, and with both AMD and Nvidia expecting silicon shortages to end from mid-2022, the chance of getting a graphics card at a reasonable price doesn’t seem far away.

So, what happens if you add a GPU to either of these two systems? Traditionally, AMD’s Ryzen G processors used to feature a reduced number of PCIe lanes for graphics. In fact, with the 3000 G series, it was half that of what you’d find on the non-APU equivalent or Intel’s chips (x8 not x16 lanes). That meant most GPUs would be bottlenecked by a lack of bandwidth as the lanes just weren’t there. x8 PCIe 3.0 lanes equates to around 8GB/s (or 64Gb/s or 4GT/s whatever takes your fancy) of maximum bandwidth, whereas x16 doubles that figure leading to a max of 16GB/s. The latest generation, PCIe 4.0, doubles those figures again, so you end up with a max bandwidth of 32GB/s across a x16 slot port, and so forth.

Now, we have yet to saturate the PCIe 3.0 x16 slot, 16GB/s is more than enough bandwidth to facilitate even the most high-end graphics card. That said, x8 lanes isn’t, and you typically end up with a reduction in frame rate of between 5-20%. Fortunately,

AMD has redesigned its latest APUs to include x16 graphics PCIe lane support. It’s still PCIe

3.0, but if you add a fullsized GPU, you shouldn’t see any performance degradation, unlike what we saw back with the 3000 series. Good stuff.

The only concern is what AMD and Nvidia produce in terms of their next-gen GPUs, and how large the performance delta will be compared with the previous generation. We expect to see both the RTX

4000 series and RX 7000 series cards launch next year. AMD will likely have packed some dedicated hardware in for raytracing and Nvidia will be going harder than ever, due to the increased competition from the RX 6000 series.

It could be the year that we finally eke over that 16GB/s PCIe 3.0 x16 lane bandwidth limit, at which performance may begin to drop with our AMD Ryzen 7 5700G series processors (along with every other PCIe 3.0 chip, including Intel’s 10 series parts too).

These things are hard to predict, and the performance difference may be less than 10% so it’s a fairly negligible worry, but it’s worth considering if you plan to invest in a GPU later on.