Tony Yu, ASUS’ Product Manager based in China, revealed an ASUS DUAL GeForce RTX 4060 Ti prototype graphics card with an M.2 SSD slot. Revealed on BiliBili, a Chinese social media platform, the prototype ASUS DUAL GeForce RTX 4060 Ti features a PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 slot for NVMe SSDs. The concept aims to utilize the unused PCIe lanes on the X16 PCIe slot given that the RTX 4060 Ti GPU only uses a PCIe X8 bus interface. This leaves open lanes for the M.2 SSD added to the graphics card for SSD storage.



Maximizing the PCIe X16 Slot
The GeForce RTX 4060 Ti GPU only utilizes X8 PCIe lanes thus leaving available lanes for the added PCIe M.2 slot for SSDs.



On this prototype, the M.2 slot is conveniently located on the back of the PCB making it accessible even when the graphics card is installed on the PCIe X16 slot of the motherboard. The prototype is still in development and appears to have some rough patches visible in the photo above wherein the screw standoff misses the edge of the SSD to secure it. There’s also a LED indicator that appears to show if the populated M.2 slot is working. Nevertheless, the design works as demonstrated by Tony Yu with the speed comparison and temperature readings below.



Comparing Speeds with Motherboard M.2 Slot
Tony Yu compared used a Samsung 980 PRO 2TB NVMe SSD to demonstrate the speeds of the prototype ASUS DUAL GeForce RTX 4060 Ti with M.2 slot against an M.2 slot on a motherboard. As seen in the image above, there is barely any difference in performance between to two configurations.

Temperatures
They also demonstrated that the SSD can maintain normal operating temperatures at the back of the graphics card – not being affected by the heat coming from the GPU and its components.



There are already arising questions from the gaming and enthusiast community if ASUS can apply this concept with higher GPU models. However, this concept is unlikely to be applied to GPUs that use the full PCIe X16 bus interface.

Source: BiliBili (Tony Yu)