ASUS GeForce RTX 4060 Ti Concept Card With A Built-In SSD Slot Heads To Retail
Earlier this year, ASUS China detailed an upcoming model of the RTX 4060 Ti that was notable for including an M.2 slot for NVMe SSDs. Today, that GPU (officially titled the ASUS Dual GeForce RTX 4060 Ti SSD) is finally hitting the shelves across Europe, and for a fairly reasonable price as spotted by leaker Momomo_us on X. While it may seem off-beat to offer an M.2 slot on a GPU, it's actually got some key benefits.
At first glance, it might seem unintuitive to put an SSD on a graphics card, but it's actually not a bad idea. The primary benefit is cooling, since PCIe 5.0 SSDs require good cooling to sustain peak performance. In the case of this RTX 4060 Ti from ASUS, the M.2 slot is actually reversed so the top side of the SSD is installed to make contact with the GPU's heatsink. This simple but clever trick is what makes this concept work, and it should provide pretty decent cooling since this cooler is made for a 150+ watt GPU, when SSDs consume single digits of watts.
Cooling isn't the only benefit here though, it can also open up additional PCIe lanes for SSDs, especially PCIe 5.0 lanes. While many motherboards have just one or two PCIe 5.0 M.2 slots for SSDs, lots of these same boards come with an x16 PCIe 5.0 slot for GPUs that isn't really being used. It actually makes lots of sense to use some of those lanes for storage. Plus, with Microsoft's nascent DirectStorage technology that links GPUs and SSDs together directly, why not put them as close as possible?
Momomo_us also detailed how this RTX 4060 Ti is priced in the wider market for Finland and Sweden, where the three retailers are located. Although this GPU is both new and niche, often a combination that makes for an expensive product, this 4060 Ti only comes to about 5% more expensive than the cheapest ASUS 4060 Tis available at the three Scandinavian retailers.
At first glance, it might seem unintuitive to put an SSD on a graphics card, but it's actually not a bad idea. The primary benefit is cooling, since PCIe 5.0 SSDs require good cooling to sustain peak performance. In the case of this RTX 4060 Ti from ASUS, the M.2 slot is actually reversed so the top side of the SSD is installed to make contact with the GPU's heatsink. This simple but clever trick is what makes this concept work, and it should provide pretty decent cooling since this cooler is made for a 150+ watt GPU, when SSDs consume single digits of watts.
Cooling isn't the only benefit here though, it can also open up additional PCIe lanes for SSDs, especially PCIe 5.0 lanes. While many motherboards have just one or two PCIe 5.0 M.2 slots for SSDs, lots of these same boards come with an x16 PCIe 5.0 slot for GPUs that isn't really being used. It actually makes lots of sense to use some of those lanes for storage. Plus, with Microsoft's nascent DirectStorage technology that links GPUs and SSDs together directly, why not put them as close as possible?
Momomo_us also detailed how this RTX 4060 Ti is priced in the wider market for Finland and Sweden, where the three retailers are located. Although this GPU is both new and niche, often a combination that makes for an expensive product, this 4060 Ti only comes to about 5% more expensive than the cheapest ASUS 4060 Tis available at the three Scandinavian retailers.
