A Steam Deck enthusiast has done what Steam would not (at least not in the first rendition of its popular Steam Deck handheld console): he went and added an external GPU to the mix. The owner of the ETA Prime YouTube channel managed to increase the Steam Deck's APU-powered graphical oomph with a much more powerful AMD RX 6900 XT graphics card. To do so required sacrifices however: since the SteamDeck doesn't feature a proper Thunderbolt 3/4 connector, ETA Prime had to remove the Steam Deck's SSD from its M.2 port, instead mounting a special M.2 to PCIe adapter in the SSD slot itself.

This, of course, required that installed games be run off memory cards, which generally offer lower speeds (a less than stellar experience) than the onboard SSD. It also required butchering the Steam Deck's OS by replacing it with Windows 11. But it did allow the Steam Deck's APU to tap onto power otherwise unavailable to it, unlocking playable framerates with maxed out detail settings on games such as God of War, Cyberpunk 2077, Elden Ring, and others.

BIOSTAR today introduced the TZ590-BTC DUO, a feature-packed motherboard for crypto-currency mining setups, based on the Intel Z590 chipset, and supporting 10th- and 11th Gen Core processors in the LGA1200 package. The board puts out a total of eight PCI-Express 3.0 x1 slots, all from the Z590 PCH, besides a PCI-Express 4.0 x16 slot wired to the CPU, and four M.2-2280 slots. One of these is PCI-Express 4.0 x4 and wired to the CPU, while the others are Gen 3, and from the PCH. With M.2 to PCIe adapters already in the wild, you can install up to 12 graphics cards on this board. Connectivity options on this board include some legacy ports, including D-Sub for video from the iGPU, besides HDMI; and a PS/2 keyboard port. There is also an unusually high number of SATA ports, at 10 of them, besides the four M.2 NVMe. So you can also farm Chia at scale while you mine. BIOSTAR didn't reveal pricing.

Kosin a Chinese subsidiary of Lenovo has recently published a video showing how they modded their Ryzen notebook to run an RTX 3090 from the NVMe M.2 slot. Kosin used their Xiaoxin Air 14 laptop with a Ryzen 5 4600U processor for the demonstration. The systems internal M.2 NVMe SSD was removed and an M.2 to PCIe expansion cable was attached allowing them to connect the RTX 3090. Finally, the laptop housing was modified to allow the PCIe cable to exit the chassis and a desktop power supply was attached to the RTX 3090 for power.

The system booted and correctly detected and utilized the attached RTX 3090. The system performed admirably scoring 14,008 points in 3DMark TimeSpy, for comparison the RTX 3090 paired with a desktop Ryzen 5 3600 scores 15,552, and when paired with a Ryzen 7 5800X scores 17,935. While this is an extreme example pairing an RTX 3090 with a mid-range mobile processor it goes to show the amount of performance achievable over the NVMe M.2 connector. The x4 PCIe 3.0 link of the laptop's M.2 slot could handle a maximum of 4 GB/s, while the x16 PCIe 3.0 slot on previous generation processors offered 16 GB/s, and the new x16 PCIe 4.0 connector doubles that providing 32 GB/s of available bandwidth.

Silverstone at CES 2020 took the opportunity to showcase selections of their portfolio for the media, ranging from PC cases in major form-factors, PSUs, and a range of "ease-of-life" and aesthetic-driven accessories. Accessory-wise, there's a range of SSD-related products, such as the MS09 stick, which allows conversion of an M.2 SSD to what basically amounts to a USB 3.1 pen drive; other products in this category include the MS09-Mini and the MS11, which improves support for the NVMe protocol. The ECM26 is a PCIe adapter for M.2 sticks, while the Silverstone TP02-M2 presents itself as a heatsink for installation on non-passive-cooled M.2 SSDs.

Continuing the SSD accessories galore, there are a number of other solutions, including a tool-less NMVe to PCIe adapter (ECM21-E), an ARGB powered one (ECM24-ARGB, which includes a heatsink), a simpler, non-ARGB one with a heatsink (ECM23), and my personal favorite, a docking station for a barebones M.2 drive you may have around, in the form of the TS16 station. The presence of a Power button very surely means this can't be hot-swapped - the risk of data-loss is real.