A benchmark of an Intel Z490 motherboard running an SSD at PCIe Gen 4 speeds has been spotted online and the results are quite impressive. In the benchmark, an Intel Z490 motherboard was spotted running an 11th Gen Intel Rocket Lake CPU and a Samsung 980 Pro SSD at Gen 4 speeds and the SSD delivers read/write speeds that are faster than the PS5’s SSD.
The Z490 motherboards first came out with the 10th Gen Intel processors. However, 10th Gen CPUs had no support for PCIe Gen 4 so we never got to see the Z490 motherboards in action since it required a compatible Rocket Lake CPU. But since there are more and more Rocket Lake ES/QS CPUs going around in the wild now, we get to see the first performance results.
In the benchmark, an undisclosed Intel Rocket Lake Desktop CPU was seen running on an MSI Z490-A PRO motherboard which is an entry-level Z490 motherboard. The CPU used in the benchmark is an early QS sample but it enables PCIe Gen 4.0 support on the Z490 platform.
Image Credit: WCCFTECH
Like the Z490 motherboards, Z590 boards will also enable Gen 4.0 support only with a compatible 11th Gen Rocket Lake CPU. The older 10th and 11th Gen Comet Lake (Refresh) CPUs will not allow Gen 4.0 functionality on either of the boards.
The MSI Z490-A PRO motherboard was running the latest BIOS which has added support for Rocket Lake-S CPUs along with other features like an updated ME 14.1, support for Resizable-BAR (AMD & NVIDIA GPUs). The SSD used in the benchmark is a Samsung 980 PRO 1TB.
In the CrystalDiskMark benchmark, the Intel Z490 platform with Rocket Lake CPU was able to achieve over 7 Gb/s reads and over 5 Gb/s write speeds which is much faster than the 5.5 Gb/s read speeds of the PS5 SSD.
What do you think about the new benchmarks of the Intel Z490 motherboard? Let us know in the comments section below.
