If you are a frequent listener of Tech Talk Thursdays or just read about how I would have saved Western Digital, you know that I love storage. Every time I think about it, I feel like Goldmember from that Austin Powers movie.
I love storage!”
MajorLinux at various moments in his life
I was also made acutely aware that physical space is at a premium in most PCs. Be it places to place hard drives in the case or NVMes on a motherboard. Most motherboards only really allow for two M.2 slots nowadays.
And now with PCIe 5 and these blazing fast drives, it gives blazing a new name. These drives get hot. They need cooling. And with most of these drives sitting under graphics cards, it becomes a nightmare game of Tetris.
What is a boy to do?
Well, it looks like Asus might have solved all of our problems. Why not just put the NVMe drive IN your graphics card?!
Honestly, it’s a great solution. Both the NVMe and the GPU use the PCIe lanes on your motherboard. So, they decided to let the M.2 just piggyback off the GPUs lanes. Just slap it into the bottom of the card and you’re off. It comes with a heat shield, too, for your hotter drives. I wonder if it uses the GPU’s cooling, too.
Outside of that design change, the card looks just like any other RTX 4060 Ti. Nobody will be none the wiser. The card has 8GB VRAM, but hey, at least you got storage.
The other thing is that this card (named the Asus GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 8GB Dual OC + 2280M.2 SSD Expansion slot) doesn’t appear to be sold in the US. Right now, it only seems to be appearing in Europe.
