Non plussed by PCI Express 5.0? Apathetic about its 6.0 successor? Then prepare to be even more underwhelmed by PCIe Express 7.0, which has just achieved 'final draft' status (via Overclock3D).
In really simple terms, final draft status means that PCIe 7.0 is a done deal unless a member company of the PCI-SIG organisation responsible for defining PCIe standards objects to the draft.
And what are the highlights from that draft, you probably aren't crying? Well, like pretty much every PCIe generation before, Gen 7 doubles the available bandwidth of its progenitor. That, of course, is Gen 6, which was introduced in 2022 but hasn't actually made it into consumer hardware as yet, though is has popped up in a data centre SSD from Micron.
Anyway, PCIe Gen 5, which is as good as it currently gets on the PC, tops out at 128 GB/s for a bi-directional 16-lane interface, such as that used for add-in graphics cards. PCIe Gen 6 doubles that to 256 GB/s. And, yup, you guessed it, PCIe Gen 7 doubles that again to 512 GB/s.
As for storage, PCIe Gen 7 would in theory allow for a quad-lane SSD to spew out 64 GB/s of raw data throughput. Well, that minus a little protocol overhead. But you'd still be looking at a very large number.
Anyway, if you're wondering what else PCIe 7 brings, here's the list in full:
- Delivering 128 GT/s raw bit rate and up to 512 GB/s bi-directionally via x16 configuration
- Utilising PAM4 (Pulse Amplitude Modulation with 4 levels) signaling
- Focusing on the channel parameters and reach
- Improving power efficiency
- Continuing to deliver the low-latency and high-reliability targets
- Maintaining backwards compatibility with all previous generations of PCIe technology
As for timing, if our math is correct, and assuming Gen 7 is indeed finalised this year, that means PCIe Gen 6 was updated after three years, with Gen 5 coming in three years before that.
Gen 4 was the shortest lived of any PCIe generation, being usurped in just two years, while PCIe Gen 3 was the longest lived, surviving for seven years. Of course, given that PCIe Gen 6 has been out for three years but doesn't seem to be threatening to appear in PCs any time soon, you might wonder what the point of it all is.
Well, standards need to be set well in advance of new hardware being introduced. It's typically several years before the beginning of work on, say, a new CPU or GPU, and that chip being introduced. So, definitions for interconnects need to be finalised in time to allow for that.
You could more broadly question the need for so much bandwidth. It seems unlikely, for instance, that flash memory chips are going to be capable of saturating that theoretical 64 GB/s of bandwidth any time soon.
On the other hand, the appetite for bandwidth of modern PCs games only seems to be accelerating of late. So, laying the groundwork for plenty of throughput definitely seems like a good idea.
Moreover, we're probably looking at a date some time into the 2030s before actual PCIe Gen 7 devices are anything like commonplace. And who knows how much bandwidth we'll need for our 16K gaming by then, eh?
In the meantime, you can peruse some high-bandwidth action among our best SSDs of 2025 here. To be brutally honest, the fastest PCIe 5 SSDs bring little to no benefit for gaming. But what the heck, you might want to shunt some big video files around, in which case a quick drive will get that job done much faster.
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