Desktop PCs in general, and gaming PC desktops in particular, can get rather cluttered inside with lots of cables. Today, at Computex 2023, ASUS showed off a graphics card prototype that doesn’t need cables to provide it with power.
Instead, as PC Gamer reports, the custom ASUS NVIDIA GeForce 4070 card connects to a custom slot on a PC motherboard, that slot provides the card with up to 600W of power. PC Gamer stated:
Asus’s hardware solution involves a secondary slot on the motherboard that looks similar in size and shape to a 1x PCIe connection. The graphics card part of the solution sticks out separate from and aft of the main 16x PCIe connector on the PCB.
PC Gamer says that ASUS’s custom motherboard slot may actually be a passthrough for a 16-pin connection to the actual power supply. That still means cables are used at some point to connect the PSU to the motherboard, but they don’t actually connect directly to the graphics card.
Right now there’s no word on if this new graphics card power configuration is limited to just ASUS cards and motherboards, or if it might also be adopted by other PC hardware makers. The article does say that these new motherboards will still work with graphics cards that need the old-fashioned power cable attached directly.
This kind of solution will not just help with making the inside of a PC desktop a bit cleaner. It will also allow people who build or upgrade their own PCs a simpler way to switch out graphics cards with new GPUs.
Right now, there’s no word on when, or even if, ASUS will launch motherboards and graphics cards with this new slot-based power solution. If and when that does happen, we expect that it will cost a bit more to buy compared to standard cards and motherboards.