Take advantage of unused PCI Express lines on certain graphics cards to connect them to a more accessible M.2 port.
With the release of the latest GeForce (RTX 4060 and RTX 4060 Ti) and Radeon (RX 7600) graphics cards, we've "rediscovered" those graphics cards that connect to a PCI Express x16 port, but aren't able to exploit its full potential. In fact, on such cards, only half of the so-called PCI Express lines are used. So a GeForce RTX 4060 Ti plugged into its PCI Express x16 slot "wastes" 8 PCI Express lines that are not used by the GPU, but are no longer accessible by any other component. That is, until ASUS presented a very interesting prototype.
The presentation was made by Tony Yu, one of the Taiwanese brand's executives. The idea is to fit out an RTX 4060 Ti graphics card, otherwise identical to those already distributed by ASUS, so that not all unused PCI Express lines are used. An M.2 port has been added to the graphics card PCB, enabling connection of a standard M.2 NVMe SSD. Connected via PCIe 4.0 x4, it will operate as normally as possible, since the PCI Express lines in question are directly managed by the machine's processor. The SSD will operate in exactly the same way as the M.2 #1 port on any motherboard.
The SSD should also take advantage of the graphics card's cooling system - which is generally quite robust - and it would appear that the heating caused by the SSD is quite negligible for the graphics card. According to ASUS, the same applies to the additional electricity required to power the SSD. This is because the graphics card uses an 8-pin power port, which delivers far more power than both the graphics card and the SSD require. Finally, Tony Yu confirms that the SSD's peak data rates do not suffer from this connection system: in the ASUS example, they are measured at 6.8 GB/s, whereas they can reach 6.9 GB/s with a conventional connection.
Finally, it's worth pointing out that the first M.2 port on today's motherboards is not very accessible. Worse still, on some micro-ATX or mini-ITX models, there is only one M.2 port. ASUS' solution therefore has the good taste to add another M.2 port for storage units: a port that has its own cooling system and seems much more accessible. An innovation to be extended to "small" graphics cards?
