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
I'm not seeing it. Storage does last longer than a midrange 8GB piece of crap. Just buy storage to suit your board, and vice versa, its not rocket science.Has done all sorts of misguided shit and still pushes features on boards that nobody wants. I count this among them to be fair. Its new. Its pointless.
The concept is so stupid, I can't even think of an edge-case situation where something like this would make sense.
If someone has to rely on a GPU in order to have an extra M.2 slot - there's something seriously wrong with that "someone's" planning.
Heck, there are ITX boards with 2x M.2 slots, there are PCIe adapter cards for all kinds of situations, there are cheap ATX motherboards which can give you not only two slots, but also a full x8 PCIe for NVME RAID card etc. etc. etc.
If someone argues accessibility - even in a worst case scenario where your M.2 slot is blocked by GPU it takes less effort to take out a GPU and unscrew a drive than take out a GPU and partially disassemble it to take out the drive(unless someone is stupid enough to do it while GPU is mounted and potentially bend/damage a PCIe slot).
Active cooling off a GPU heatsink also has questionable benefits, especially in real-world usage (where realistically you can run any NVME drive without a heatsink, or at most - cooled by stock candybar foil and cat farts).
P.S. Though, with CN market I've already given up in finding logic in stuff. Sometimes they make weird things that are absolutely genius, and sometimes it's so stupid to the point of not even being funny.
I guess that's just the way it is.
1. The GPU heatsink might provide adequate cooling to a PCI-e 5.0 SSD without the need for excessive m.2 cooling, like mini blower fans or being part of a water loop. The only problem with this logic is that the card is PCI-e 4.0.
2. A proof of concept that may not even enter mass production in the near future, or at all.
Out of Asus's weird ideas, I'm more interested to see the motherboard-integrated PCI-e power connector + slot-powered GPU combo.
Though I won't claim to be an expert.