The Nvidia RTX 4060 Ti may not be the fastest graphics card around, but even its most powerful siblings can’t saturate the bandwidth of PCIe 4.0. In a somewhat ingenious move, Asus thinks it has the answer: put your SSD inside your GPU.
ASUS China’s General Manager, Tony Yu posted a video unveiling the unique use of an M.2 SSD slot onto a GeForce RTX 4060 Ti graphics card. The video, which was posted on the Shanghai based video-sharing platform Bilibli, revealed a Samsung 980 Pro 2B SSD attached to the backside of the concept RTX 4060 Ti dual GPU.
The proposed concept by ASUS of adding an M.2 slot into a graphics card aims to better utilize the use of PCIe lanes for modern mid-range GPUs. At the present time, a lot of mid-range graphics cards, like Nvidia’s RTX 4060 Ti, only require 8 PCIe lanes, yet they take up 16 lane slots. Having an SSD be incorporated into the GPU itself would enable better use of the newly available lanes.
Not only would this be beneficial in utilizing more PCIe lanes, but having a graphics card with an M.2 slot would be beneficial to those who regularly change their SSDs. In order to change your solid state drive, you have to go through a series of arduous tasks, so this could help make the process easier for the average gaming PC building enthusiast.
As this is just a concept, and we can’t be sure if we’ll ever see an M.2 slot integrated as part of an ASUS graphics card available on the market any time soon. As it stands, attaching a SSD to a graphics card could resort in heat issues, should it ever be approved for market. Although it appears in the video that the RTX 4060 Ti’s PCB has been modified to allow air from the cooler to reach the SSD to rectify that very problem. Even so, its integration is an intriguing way of making the most out of a modern gaming PC setup, and I hope we see more innovations like it in the future.
If ASUS’s clever use of integrating an M.2 slot on a GPU has got you thinking about upgrading, you can check out our guide to the best SSD’s and find what’s the best fit for your PC setup.
Featured image source: ASUS/Bilibili.