A Current Review of PCIe 3.0 Graphics Cards in 2013

As someone who is serious about PC gaming I'm constantly trying to get an edge up on my competitors by upgrading my hardware and gaming peripherals. In this post I'll review the differences between the PCIe 3.0 interface and 2.0 and give you all the need-to-know information about making sure your system is compatible with PCIe 3.0. I'll also give you a list of my favorite Radeon and GeForce PCIe 3.0 graphics cards.

What's the difference between PCIe 3.0 vs. the previous version PCIe 2.0.

PCIe 3.0 allows for twice as much bandwidth with its 8 GT/s bit rate by removing the requirement 2.0 has for 8b/10b encoding. The first graphics cards with PCIe 3.0 compatibility were released by AMD in January of 2012. PCIe 3.0 peripherals are backwards compatible with 2.0; however, when used in this way regain the limitations of 2.0. For more information on history of the PCIe interface I suggest you go here.

PCIe 3.0 Is it Worth It?

For gaming, there is little benefit to having a PCIe 3.0 graphics card as manufacturers were just starting to reach the limits of PCIe 2.0 when PCIe 3.0 was released. The benefit seems to be greater with higher resolutions and better more distinct for a card like the GTX 680 vs. Radeon's 7970. For more information on that I suggest this post. For computing technologies like OpenCL, CUDA and C++ AMP there is even more of a distinct advantage to using PCIe 3.0.

Is Your GPU, CPU, and Motherboard Compatible with PCIe 3.0?

As far as graphics cards are concerned the Radeon HD 7000 series as well as the GeForce GTX 600 series both use and support the PCIe 3.0 interface.

As of right now you must use a third generation Intel Ivy Bridge processor along with a PCIe 3.0 compatible motherboard in order to truly use PCIe 3.0. The motherboard chipsets which are compatible with PCIe 3.0 at this point in time are the GEN3 Z68 motherboards, Z77, Z75, H77, Q77,Q75, and B75. AMD does not yet have a CPU which supports PCIe 3.0.