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All of AMD and Nvidia’s latest GPUs use the PCIe Gen 5 interface, but that doesn’t mean you need a PCIe Gen 5 motherboard to run them. You do need to keep an eye on the number of lanes, though. If your motherboard has a 16x PCIe Gen 4 slot, you’ll still have more than enough bandwidth to run any 16x PCIe Gen 5 GPU up to and including the RTX 5080, and even an RTX 5090 will run at full speed for the most part. If you only have PCIe Gen 3, however, there will be a performance drop off, particularly with cards at the cheaper end of the scale, as a lot of these GPUs use fewer PCIe lanes than their

That depends on your graphics card. All the latest top-end Nvidia GPUs, from the RTX 5070 Ti to the 5090, require this 16-pin connector, and you’ll find it on some RTX 5070 cards and lower-tier models as well. Some cards based on the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT also use it, such as the Sapphire Nitro+ range. If your card uses old-school 6-pin and 8-pin PCIe connectors, then pretty much any PSU from the last ten years will be able to cope with it, providing it has the capacity and connectors to marry up to it. Even if your PSU doesn’t have a 12V-2×6 cable, though, there are still ways to power it thr

In the vast majority of cases, no, but in some cases, sadly, yes. We’ve even seen one melt on our own test equipment recently. There’s a hell of a lot of current being passed through this tight bundle of cables, particularly when it’s plugged into a power-hungry GPU such as the RTX 5090. That means every connection needs to be absolutely secure, and small manufacturing defects at both ends of the cable (and indeed the sockets) can affect this situation, which puts it out of your control. You can do your best to mitigate this risk by ensuring that your 16-pin plugs are firmly clicked into the s