Comet Lake S won’t be getting PCIe 4.0 support on upcoming Intel Z590 motherboards

WCCFTech recently claimed that Intel’s upcoming Z590 motherboards will not feature PCIe 4.0 support for Comet Lake S processors, limiting support for the latest PCIe standard to the upcoming Rocket Lake S lineup. Evidently, Z590 motherboards from multiple AIB partners featured stickers stating that PCIe 4.0 support would be limited to Rocket Lake.

This could come as a disappointment to Comet Lake S owners who were planning on a platform upgrade: they’ll need a new CPU, too, in order to make use of the new standard. To be clear, though, current games don’t scale much with higher levels of PCIe bandwidth: at 4K, even a card like the GeForce RTX 3080 sees a 1-2 percent performance drop-off, if that. 

Where PCIe 4.0 does matter is in terms of high-speed SSD storage. Epic’s Nanite demo showcased what was possible when leveraging high-speed SSD storage on the PlayStation 5. In the PC space, PCIe 4.0 support is needed to match PS5 SSD speeds. This means that, at least in the years to come, PCIe 4.0 could have a tangible impact on performance or image quality as high-speed storage becomes more relevant to game design.