As we mentioned on the first page of this review, the RTX 5060 Ti uses a PCIe 8x connection, rather than the more common 16x that uses the full physical width available. That's fine for modern motherboards with PCIe 4.0 and 5.0 slots, as it still translates to a generous ~16GB/s or ~32GB/s of bandwidth respectively, but on older PCIe 3.0 motherboards it's only ~8GB/s. That's low enough that we can see some performance degradation in certain bandwidth-heavy games.

To demonstrate this, we tested on our Asus ROG Crosshair X870E Hero motherboard with the PCIe slot manually set to PCIe 3.0 in the BIOS instead of its customary 5.0. Thankfully, there's no appreciable difference in frame-rates in many games, but we spotted noticeable regressions in at least three titles - and fairly serious ones in two of those three.

Black Myth: Wukong showed around a two to four percent performance advantage on the PCIe 5.0 board, depending on resolution. In F1 24 without RT, that advantage was a more meaningful 10 percent at 1440p or 1080p. Meanwhile, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle had the PCIe 5.0 board performing 13 percent better at 1440p and 20 percent better at 1080p - pretty sizeable margins at the resolutions that the RTX 5060 Ti is likely to inhabit.

With this in mind, it's best to stick to motherboards with PCIe 4.0 or PCIe 5.0 slots, and expect similar restrictions for the RTX 5060 Ti 8GB and the upcoming RTX 5060.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle: PCIe 3.0 vs PCIe 5.0

F1 24

F1 24 (RT off): PCIe 3.0 vs PCIe 5.0

Black Myth: Wukong

Black Myth: Wukong: PCIe 3.0 vs PCIe 5.0

Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB Analysis