Motherboards with PCIe 3.0 support

PCIe 3.0 support

— support for PCI Express 3.0.

Let us remind you, PCIe slots are standardly used for connecting video cards and other expansion cards; furthermore, the PCIe mode is applied in other interfaces (e.g., Thunderbolt for external peripherals and M.2 for internal SSDs). Specifically, version 3.0 is the most common today (the more advanced version 4.0 only appeared in 2019 and is just gaining popularity). The data transfer rate in PCIe 3.0 is 984 MB/s per lane; thus, the PCIe 16x interface of this version can achieve a bandwidth of 15.8 GB/s.

It is worth noting that different versions of PCIe are mutually compatible with each other, but the bandwidth is limited by the slowest standard. For example, a PCIe 4.0 video card installed in a PCIe 3.0 slot will only be able to operate at half its maximum speed (according to version 3.0 specifications).