PCIe 5 and 6 will need thermal throttling to avoid overheating

With PCIe 5 and 6 SSD standards already among us, many are concerned – and rightly so – about the temperature they reach and ways to avoid overheating. To this end, manufacturers are already starting to work on thermal throttling to avoid problems for users.

Intel, for example, has already revealed controller drivers that limit bandwidth and transfer rates for the latest PCI Express standard – however, this is only available on the Linux operating system. The intention is to limit the frequencies of the current PCIe 5, as well as add more lane number limiters for PCIe 6.

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The intention is for the driver to be activated under certain circumstances. According to Phoronix, it should incorporate a mechanism that reduces the connection width of PCIe 6 devices. Therefore, a Gen 6 x4 drive could be reduced to x2 or x1 when the system detects excessively high temperatures.

Regarding PCIe 5, thermal throttling should only be activated when the frequency increases in specific workloads. Considering that they can currently reach speeds of up to 14 GB/s, this is increasingly necessary for less efficient cooling solutions on your PC.

Preventing overheating in PCIe 5 SSDs

Thermal throttling is extremely common in GPUs and processors, preventing hardware from overcoming its limitations to achieve better performance – posing risks in relation to its temperature and preventing it from being damaged by overheating.

While these work in this way, others use cooling systems such as heatsinks and fans. This way, there is no need for a dedicated driver to contain its temperature – as we see in the PCI Express standard before.

What happened in the past and is also seen in PCIe 5 is the increase in transfer rates, which causes saturation in bus speed. The physical process is “forced” and causes greater heating than officially recorded – also creating a lower signal efficiency and creating more noise in operations.

Fonte: PCGamer