ASUS demonstrated the concept of integrating an M.2 SSD slot into the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti graphics card to take advantage of unused PCIe lanes within the GPU.
ASUS wants to take advantage of the potential of unused PCIe lanes by equipping the on-board GPUs with M.2 slots
Tony Yu, General Manager of ASUS, an offer The idea of having a physical Gen 4 M.2 SSD working in tandem with the GPU on the same PCB. They used a Samsung 980 PRO 2TB SSD that was attached to the back of the graphics card with a cutout made. This opening is easy to access and the back panel acts as a heat sink for the storage device.
You may be wondering why an SSD is installed inside a GPU; The answer is simple: this is done to use unused PCIe lanes. As you can see, cards like NVIDIA’s RTX 4060 series only feature PCIe x8 lanes which means AIBs that use a full x16 slot have an extra x8 lane. M.2 SSDs use the PCIe x4 interface and it makes perfect sense to put up to two SSD slots on the card’s PCB.
Moreover, one of the advantages that ASUS highlights of having an M.2 slot on the graphics card is the ease of changing the SSD inside your PC. Installing an SSD usually requires us to go through many complicated steps, which can annoy consumers who frequently swap out their SSDs. Well, if the GPU has an M.2 slot, that will simplify things.
Installing an SSD on the GPU may cause temperature issues, however, this factor is kept in mind, which is why the company has modified the GPU’s PCB in such a way that the GPU cooling can reach the SSD as well. Since GPUs are equipped with much larger heatsinks than we’ve seen with SSDs, initial testing revealed a 10°C drop in the SSD’s temperature. Power will also be a bit of a concern since Gen 4 SSDs don’t pull much from the wall and the RTX 4060s is equipped with a single 8-pin connector which itself can allow up to 150 watts with an additional 75 watts coming from the PCIe slot. In addition, this is a custom design from ASUS that should provide good thermal performance.
During tests, the SSD showed similar performance when attached to an ASUS GeForce RTX 4060 Ti GPU as it would when attached to a Gen4 motherboard. Temperatures were also well under 50 degrees Celsius, even under full stress load.
Given the feasibility of this idea, one might argue that PCIe extension cards are the way to go if you’re looking for additional M.2 slots. Well, that may be true, but installing PCIe cards and a GPU on a single motherboard will affect the aesthetics of the design. Having an M.2 slot on graphics cards has a slight impact on power draw and will save costs compared to purchasing an extension card.
AMD also took a similar approach with its Radeon SSG graphics cards but instead of using additional SSDs for traditional storage, SSG took advantage of NVMe storage to boost the bandwidth and transfer rates of the GPU itself. The idea is currently a concept, and ASUS hasn’t revealed plans to launch a GeForce RTX 4060 Ti with such a design in the consumer market yet.
The crucial point will be how these GPUs are priced. If the difference compared to a regular graphics card is less, then it will surely attract consumer interest. This isn’t the only prototype/concept card ASUS is working on as AIB has also revealed plans to build GPUs without any physical power connectors as seen at Computex 2023.
source: @olrak29_