Remember That ASUS GeForce RTX 4070 With No Power Cables? It's Allegedly Coming Soon
ASUS is purportedly getting ready to mass produce a batch of GeForce RTX 4070 graphics cards that draw power entirely from the motherboard, via a proprietary slot. Such a design sidesteps the need to plug a power supply cable directly into the graphics card, which effectively makes it a cable-less GPU. The tradeoff is that it requires a special motherboard to pull this off.
To be clear, having a graphics card draw power from the motherboard—and specifically the PCI Express slot that it plugs into—is by no means a new concept. However, higher end graphics cards draw too much power to make this feasible. And so only entry-level and some lower power mid-range graphics cards can get away forgoing a direct line to the power supply unit (PSU).
ASUS aims to change that with a specially designed GeForce RTX 4070 model that it showed off at Computex earlier this year. It's a 2.3-slot design (so effectively 3 slots) with an extra connector protruding from the graphics card's PCB, which plugs into a special slot on the motherboard labeled GC_HPWR. It's essentially a mini-slot that sits in front of the PCIe connector on the motherboard, and it's capable of delivering up to 600W of power. The concept is similar (though not exactly the same) to AMD's Radeon Pro modules (like the Radeon Pro W7500X MPX) for select Apple systems.
That extra GC_HPWR slot is not a common feature of motherboards. To that end, ASUS built a Z790 TUF Gaming motherboard that has the necessary slot to accommodate the connector. It also moves all of the power connectors to the back, including a trio of 8-pin PCIe connectors and a 12VHPWR connector.
Those connectors route power from the PSU directly to the graphics card. Or put another way, instead of plugging the necessary PSU cables into the graphics card, you plug them into a specially designed motherboard instead, which in turn feeds the GPU.
What's the point? The main one is a cleaner design, as it makes cable management a little easier—you can tuck all the power cables behind the motherboard tray and leave the main section in pristine, clutter-free condition. This also sidesteps potential issues with securing a solid connection to the graphics card, though now you'd have to make sure you have a solid connection with the connector on the motherboard. It's all reminiscent of Maingear's and Gigabyte's collaboration on Project Stealth.
While introduced at Computex, ASUS again showed off the design at the Bilibili World 2023. EIXA Studio was on hand to capture it on video. It's not in English, but according to the folks at WCCTech, ASUS confirmed that the cable-less card (available in black and white color options) will go into mass production later this year.
