The 24 PCIE lanes are a definite yes to performance improvements lanes in your motherboard are the highways for the data that travels to and from high-speed expansion devices like GPUs and SSDs. Each lane is made up of two pairs of copper wires that can transfer data at up to 8GB/s in each direction (read: 16GB/s total). The more PCIe lanes your motherboard has, the higher the total bandwidth it can offer.

Some of the lanes on your motherboard are dedicated to your processor, and some are managed by your chipset. This is what causes the bottlenecks mentioned above when you try to install a device that requires more than the amount of PCIe lanes available on your motherboard.

Unleashing Peak Performance: Why 24 PCIE Lanes Are a Game-Changer for Your System

For example, non-HEDT Intel CPUs only have 20 PCIe lanes on their processors, but four of those are reserved for the DMI link between the CPU SoC and Chipset. Those remaining lanes are then divided into the various expansion slots and other components, such as USB ports, SATA ports, onboard Ethernet, and M.2 slots, among others.

So, does 24 PCIe lanes mean a definite yes to performance improvements? The answer depends on the kind of work you do and the type of GPU you’re running. In general, current-generation graphics cards will perform pretty much the same on either 8 or 16 lanes, assuming they have a compatible PCIe 4.0 connection. However, PCIe 5.0 is on the horizon and will bring even more bandwidth to the table.