9th to 11th gen feels like a pretty big jump forward, but sitting here with my 5.0+ 10th gen and I don't really see the advantage of upgrading until 12th gen, which is kind of a bummer. Can anyone tell me about the subtle improvements from 10th to 11th gen motherboards/processors?

rblaes_99
well i love the pcie 4.0 NvMe drive speed.  and love knowing my 3090 kingpin is in a 4.0 slot.  but not sure i would do it if I was on z490.  I would wait for DDR5 motherboards. 

Yup, Exactly. I was on a 5820k, so I was ready lol. If I was sitting on a 10900k or maybe even 9900k, I'm not sure I would have seen much improvement at 1440p, so I'm not sure I would have gone for this generation. It's way better than 9900k in some CPU benchmarks, and beats 10900k in SC stuff enough that sometimes the 8 cores keep up with that 10 core...but not always, and not enough to make it worth upgrading from that. It would be more of a side-grade for the gen 4 features.
 
I also just got a gen 4 NVMe drive and got to see my computer do some ~6900Mbps reads lol. Awesome stuff.

rblaes_99
btw nike did you download the western digital nvme tool for the SN850?  allows the drives to be put in "game mode" whatever that is.  

Oh yeah...I did download that...and totally forgot to click that button. No idea what it does. *searching*...found this...suggests a good boost in load-times and that it just disables the low-power states generally only needed for running in laptops. Same story here. I'm'a have to hit that button lol.

only for pcie 4.0 I suspect

pcie 4 provides almost no increase in performance for gaming since current gpus hardly saturate the bandwidth.  the only real world advantage right now is with read/write speeds and even those are only noticeable with compiles and whatnot.

I'm jumping from X-58 this is gonna be bomb when I finaly get the gpu
the rest is all here except the psu which comes on Tuesday, if the Dark
isn't in queue it'll be build on anyway