ASUS Sticks A Gen 5 SSD On The RTX 4060 Ti Dual

Can’t Show Off Any GeForce RTX 4070 Super FE Reviews Yet

ASUS have come out with an interesting hybrid design, the RTX 4060 Ti Dual.  The RTX 4060 Ti is designed to use eight lanes of PCIe 5.0, which leaves and additional eight unused on the assumption you did install it in a PCIe x16 slot.  ASUS designed the RTX 4060 Ti Dual with an M.2-2280 slot with full PCIe 5.0 x4 wiring, no bridge or other electronic trickery which might add latency to the SSD.  The SSD hides under a heatspreader on the backplate of the GPU, with a cutout to separate the flash and controller from some of the heat the GPU produces.

Thanks to the bifurcation that PCIe offers on most motherboards, the lanes are completely separated which is why the performance of the Corsair MP700 Pro is almost exactly the same on the GPU as it is when connected to the chipset.  If anything, you will get a tiny boost on random reads and writes when the SSD is attached to the GPU.  The heat of the PCIe 5.0 SSD is dissipated effectively by the GPU’s cooler, without the need for a extra heatsink or fan, TechPowerUp measured just over 50C under heavy load.

It does add a fair amount of extra cost to an already overpriced GPU, but if you need an additional M.2 port this is one way to get it.