Sunday, July 2nd 2023
ASUS has a GeForce RTX 4060 Ti Card with an M.2 SSD Slot
ASUS Chinese GM—Tony Yu—has shown off a graphics card concept on Bilibili that has a rather unusual feature, a slot for an M.2 NVMe SSD. The card is based on NVIDIA's GeForce RT 4060 Ti GPU and although not all details are clear at this point in time, but ASUS is taking advantage of the unused PCIe lanes on the card, since the AD106 GPU only uses eight PCIe lanes, the PCIe connector on the card has space for a further eight lanes. In theory ASUS could have added a pair of SSDs, since there are a total of eight lanes available, but as this was just a proof of concept, they seemingly stuck with a single SSD.
It's unclear if ASUS relies on bifurcation or if the company has added some kind of bridge chip, but bifurcation makes more sense, as a bridge chip would add a lot more cost. The neat thing with the NVMe drive being on the GPU, is that it also connects to the heatsink of the graphics card, which means the cooling should be rather good. However, for this to work properly, the SSD would have to be mounted back to front compared to how it would be mounted on a motherboard. Based on the test results, the SSD runs at a cool 42 degrees C, even when the GPU is being stress tested. It's likely that this product will not make it to markets outside of China, if it's ever launched into retail.
Sources:
Bilibili, via @harukaze5719 (on Twitter)
It's unclear if ASUS relies on bifurcation or if the company has added some kind of bridge chip, but bifurcation makes more sense, as a bridge chip would add a lot more cost. The neat thing with the NVMe drive being on the GPU, is that it also connects to the heatsink of the graphics card, which means the cooling should be rather good. However, for this to work properly, the SSD would have to be mounted back to front compared to how it would be mounted on a motherboard. Based on the test results, the SSD runs at a cool 42 degrees C, even when the GPU is being stress tested. It's likely that this product will not make it to markets outside of China, if it's ever launched into retail.
68 Comments on ASUS has a GeForce RTX 4060 Ti Card with an M.2 SSD Slot
Though this is the same company that put a chipset on a daughter board only connected to an m.2 just so they could make an x670 itx board so yean...
Next handful of generations are going to be amazing for miniaturization and thermals limitations for stuff like this. The amount of progress we're seeing is great. I think ITX boards could stand to load up the rear I/O with additional TB4 ports why not put 4 on the rear instead of 2 better I/O on the rear, but no need for all the added size of physical PCIE slots that don't work within the limits of the form factor.
I would have seen better the possibility of upgrading the GRAM of the graphics card instead of an additional SSD, but I think it is a complex option from a technical point of view.
Best ALMorgan
HYPER M.2 X16 GEN 4 CARD｜Motherboards｜ASUS Canada
The host (i.e. chipset) has to support it, to grok what's being done w/ the different lanes. But given the preponderance of motherboards that have things like switchable slots (e.g., x16/x0 vs. x8/x8, which is bifurcation), I feel safe concluding that most if not all modern chipsets support it.
The card itself (e.g., this asus one, or m.2 breakout boards) does require some extra hardware, specifically a clock redriver. But that's small and relatively cheap.
The only thing motherboards need to do is have their bios turn the feature on and configure it properly. So, as I said, all software.
Regardless, it's cool that this can make use of the extra bandwidth via slot.