It’s not a stretch to say that, out of all the major PC component brands on the current market, ASUS is the one that has been more experimental with its offerings. Case in point, the ROG Ally and more recently with its GPU division, it created a Dual RTX 4060 Ti with a twist: a built-in M.2 slot on the back of the card.
ASUS China’s Product Manager Hideo Kojima lookalike, Tony Yu, gave a hands on the unique RTX 4060 Ti and showed it off in a somewhat spectacular fashion, plus a breakdown of the card. Upon closer look, the card is running a speciallly designed PCB and cooler, all in order to accommodate an M.2 slot that can support a full-sized 2280 SSD.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iK5mSO5wViM
Now, it should be noted while this Dual RTX 4060 Ti with the built-in M.2 slot is a PCIe 4.0 GPU, the slot itself is capable of operating SSDs with PCIe 5.0 speeds, provided the motherboard the card is connected to also supports the interface. To that end, the video also shows off a PCIe 5.0 SSD running off the slot, averaging sequential read and write speeds of 12GB/s.
ASUS also showed off another use of the PCIe 5.0-capable M.2 slot of the Dual RTX 4060 Ti: running an RTX 4090 off of it. Granted, the video shows the flagship NVIDIA GPU running on few PCIe lanes than usual – the RTX 4060 Ti itself only uses eight out of 16 PCIe lanes – but it clearly runs Cyberpunk 2077 at around 150 fps, but that said, the graphics settings in the demo is unknown.
ASUS says that its special M.2 slot-equipped Dual RTX 4060 Ti will be available this month, although at the time of writing, we don’t know if it will be locally available.
