Published Nov 1, 2026, 12:00 PM EST

Hamlin has been in the tech field for over nine years. Since 2017, his work has appeared on MakeUseOf , Android Police , OSXDaily, Beebom, and more. He served as the Senior Editor at Valnet's MakeUseOf for over two years before joining XDA. He uses a high-end gaming rig for desktop use and a MacBook for traveling, but dislikes some of the quirks of macOS. You're more likely to catch him at the gym or on a flight than anywhere else.

When I upgraded to AM5 earlier this year, I opted for an X870E motherboard, which supports PCIe 5.0 for both the GPU and NVMe drives. That's double the bandwidth of PCIe 4.0, which sounds like a big step up. And while I bought a Gen 5 SSD to take advantage of that extra bandwidth, my RTX 4090 is still a PCIe 4.0 GPU, so I'm not benefiting at all there.…