ASUS has quite an interesting, but useful graphics card that has been spotted... a new GeForce RTX 4060 Ti DUAL graphics card with an M.2 slot to slot in a super-fast SSD. Alrighty. You can see in the photo below, there's a Samsung 980 PRO SSD on the far right.
In a new video from Tony Yu (who is the GM at ASUS) shows off a concept ASUS GeForce RTX 4060 Ti DUAL graphics card that makes use of your unused PCIe lanes. Unused PCIe lanes you ask? Lower-end graphics cards are quite limited, using PCIe 4.0 x8 lanes while higher-end cards use the full PCIe 4.0 x16. The spare PCIe lanes can be used for an SSD, exactly how ASUS is showing it off with their RTX 4060 Ti DUAL card.
Instead of making fake lanes, a high-speed NVMe M.2 SSD can be used next to the GPU and sharing the PCIe 4.0 x16 slot that the card goes into.
Normally an NVMe M.2 SSD would be slotted somewhere on the motherboard, but this requires a heatsink most of the time -- these SSDs get hot when pumping full 7GB/sec or more through them -- so the M.2 SSD heatsink needs to be of good quality, and that comes down to your motherboard. It would be much easier to install an SSD onto your graphics card, which is what ASUS is doing here with the RTX 4060 Ti DUAL.
An NVMe M.2 SSD shouldn't use more than 10W of power, and since the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti doesn't chew through too much power, the single 8-pin PCIe power connector on the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti will be more than enough.
As for performance, you're not losing much at all -- in fact, you wouldn't notice -- the Samsung 980 PRO SSD is capable of up to 6.9GB/sec reads while the SSD installed into the ASUS GeForce RTX 4060 Ti DUAL drops down to 6.85GB/sec. That's still 6850MB/sec, wicked fast.
The cooling side of the ASUS GeForce RTX 4060 Ti DUAL is interesting, as the large cooler keeps both the GPU and SSD cool. ASUS has cut the PCB to allow airflow from the GPU cooler to go over the SSD, with the cooler itself attached directly to the SSD with thermal pads. So you're not going to get any thermal throttling on the SSD that you choose to install on this card.
We don't know if this card will make it to market, but it's an interesting concept... one of which I want to see more of.
