Motherboards with PCI-E 3.0 support

PCI Express 3.0

— the board supports the PCI-Express version 3.0 bus.

Recall that PCI-E connectors are standardly used to connect video cards and other expansion cards; in addition, PCI-E mode is used in other interfaces (for example, Thunderbolt for external peripherals and M.2 for internal SSDs). Specifically, version 3.0 is the most common today (a more advanced version 4.0 appeared only in 2019 and is only gaining popularity). Data transfer rate in PCI-E 3.0 is 984 Mbps per lane; thus, in the PCI-E 16x interface of this version, throughput of 15.8 GB / s can be achieved.

It is worth noting that different versions of PCI-E are mutually compatible with each other, however, the throughput is limited by the slowest standard. For example, PCI-E 4.0 graphics card installed in PCI-E 3.0 slot will only be able to operate at half its maximum speed (according to version 3.0 specifications)