GeForce RTX 5060 Ti PCIe Lanes Problem: Do You Have This Issue?

While testing the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti, I encountered a recurring issue with active PCIe lanes. On PCIe 5.0 motherboards, the card often fails to run in x8 mode even in a x16 slot, starting instead in slower x1, x2, or x4 modes. The same behavior occurred across three RTX 5060 Ti models from MSI, Gainward, and Asus. The issue likely stems from how these motherboards handle compatibility with PCIe 5.0 graphics cards using eight lanes.

How to Tell if Your GeForce RTX 50 Is Affected by a PCIe Speed Issue?

The most reliable method currently is the PCI Express Feature Test from 3DMark. Unfortunately, it’s only available in the paid 3DMark Advanced Edition or higher. This test measures PCIe bandwidth in a dedicated benchmark.

The following table shows the theoretical maximum bandwidth for each PCIe version and corresponding lane count:

Version	Line code	Transfer rate (per lane)	x1	x2	x4	x8	x16
1.0	8b/10b	2.5 GT/s	0.250 GB/s	0.500 GB/s	1.000 GB/s	2.000 GB/s	4.000 GB/s
2.0	8b/10b	5.0 GT/s	0.500 GB/s	1.000 GB/s	2.000 GB/s	4.000 GB/s	8.000 GB/s
3.0	NRZ	8.0 GT/s	0.985 GB/s	1.969 GB/s	3.938 GB/s	7.877 GB/s	15.754 GB/s
4.0	128b/130b	16.0 GT/s	1.969 GB/s	3.938 GB/s	7.877 GB/s	15.754 GB/s	31.508 GB/s
5.0	128b/130b	32.0 GT/s	3.938 GB/s	7.877 GB/s	15.754 GB/s	31.508 GB/s	63.015 GB/s

3DMark results aren’t 100% accurate. For example, during RTX 5090 testing, the test allegedly showed around 121 GB/s due to a driver bug – twice the theoretical maximum of PCIe 5.0 x16.

However, with the RTX 5060 Ti and recent drivers, measured slot speeds approximately matched the number of active lanes as detected by diagnostic utilities. This held true across all four systems tested. Measured speeds varied slightly but were within a few GB/s of theoretical values.

In the 3DMark DirectStorage feature test, the card actually appears to perform better in PCIe 5.0 x1 mode than in PCIe 5.0 x8. However, the final score reflects how much the GPU accelerates data decompression during transfers from storage to the card’s memory. What we’re focusing on here is the speed at which data moves from storage and system memory to video memory—specifically, Storage to VRAM and RAM to VRAM—and in these tests, the bandwidth over PCIe 5.0 x1 is several times lower.

DirectStorage Feature Test, PCIe 5.0 x1 vs PCIe 5.0×8

One simple, though not entirely reliable, way to check the bus speed is through GPU-Z diagnostics. It’s less certain mainly because, until the recent update to version 2.65.1, GPU-Z 2.64.0 incorrectly reported the RTX 5060 Ti as running at PCIe x16 5.0—even when only eight lanes were active. That didn’t exactly boost confidence in the accuracy of the lane count.

Version 2.65.1, which fixes this and adds RTX 5060 Ti support, was released just before the card’s official launch.

Bandwidth testing is also possible in AIDA64, but the current beta version (7.65.7404) doesn’t yet support the RTX 5060 Ti, so tests won’t run.

You could also measure bandwidth using developer tools for OpenCL and CUDA, though I didn’t install those on my test bench.