> I've yet to come up against a download (even a torrent) that seems like it would have really benefitted from having the entire theoretical 1.5 pipe available.

There are many things along the way that would get in the way of a home user downloading something from the internet that would hit that 5GB/s speed. It's not that people should be "banned" from it or something, more that the investment cost isn't worth it.

What’s described in the post is the tech equivalent of supe-ing up a sports car and then driving it in rush hour traffic. It’s fun to geek out doing it, but practically in everyday use the difference will be negligible. Even with large file uploads and downloads, there’s a good chance that services won’t reach those throughputs end to end.

What’s telling is that the post shows screenshots and charts from artificial speed tests. No videos of the Dropbox client chugging away with throttled uploads.

In my experience unless you actually pay attention and get something with a dram cache it will sustain that speed for all of 5 seconds and then drop to near useless, and with the current dram shortages that is getting harder and harder to justify.

I just did a build out where ram cost as much as the GPU and both are individually 3x more expensive than the CPU and MB combined.

A decent 2TB nvme drive was also more expensive than the CPU and MB combined.

A 10GB network connection can happily transfer at that speed all day, your SSD is unlikely to maintain Sata speeds unless you actually shelled out for something decent, what came from the manufacturer in the laptop is not that.