ASUS is purportedly on the brink of mass produce a batch of GeForce RTX 4070 graphics playing cards that draw energy completely from the motherboard, through a proprietary slot. Such a design sidesteps the necessity to plug an influence provide cable straight into the graphics card, which successfully makes it a cable-less GPU. The tradeoff is that it requires a particular motherboard to tug this off.
To be clear, having a graphics card draw energy from the motherboard—and particularly the PCI Specific slot that it plugs into—is not at all a brand new idea. Nevertheless, larger finish graphics playing cards draw an excessive amount of energy to make this possible. And so solely entry-level and a few decrease energy mid-range graphics playing cards can get away forgoing a direct line to the ability provide unit (PSU).
ASUS goals to vary that with a specifically designed GeForce RTX 4070 mannequin that it confirmed off at Computex earlier this 12 months. It is a 2.3-slot design (so successfully 3 slots) with an additional connector protruding from the graphics card’s PCB, which plugs right into a particular slot on the motherboard labeled GC_HPWR. It is primarily a mini-slot that sits in entrance of the PCIe connector on the motherboard, and it is able to delivering as much as 600W of energy. The idea is comparable (although not precisely the identical) to AMD’s Radeon Professional modules (just like the Radeon Professional W7500X MPX) for choose Apple techniques.
That further GC_HPWR slot isn’t a standard characteristic of motherboards. To that finish, ASUS constructed a Z790 TUF Gaming motherboard that has the mandatory slot to accommodate the connector. It additionally strikes all the energy connectors to the again, together with a trio of 8-pin PCIe connectors and a 12VHPWR connector.
These connectors route energy from the PSU on to the graphics card. Or put one other method, as an alternative of plugging the mandatory PSU cables into the graphics card, you plug them right into a specifically designed motherboard as an alternative, which in flip feeds the GPU.
What is the level? The primary one is a cleaner design, because it makes cable administration a little bit simpler—you’ll be able to tuck all the ability cables behind the motherboard tray and go away the principle part in pristine, clutter-free situation. This additionally sidesteps potential points with securing a stable connection to the graphics card, although now you’d need to be sure to have a stable reference to the connector on the motherboard. It is all harking back to Maingear’s and Gigabyte’s collaboration on Venture Stealth.
Whereas launched at Computex, ASUS once more confirmed off the design on the Bilibili World 2023. EIXA Studio was readily available to seize it on video. It is not in English, however in line with the oldsters at WCCTech, ASUS confirmed that the cable-less card (obtainable in black and white colour choices) will go into mass manufacturing later this 12 months.
