A couple of months ago, we posted a story from the Computex 2023 trade show. ASUS was there showing off some interesting new concepts for PC hardware. One of them was a prototype for a graphics card that didn"t use traditional cables to power it up.
Instead, the prototype card connected to a custom slot on a PC motherboard. That slot provided the card with up to 600W of power. The secret is that the slot is still connected to a standard 16-pin cable that connects to the PC"s power supply. So while the graphics card doesn"t need a cable per see, the slot that it connects to will still need cables. Having said that, such a solution should allow for a cleaner interior for PCs with fewer power cables overall.
Now, according to a story from EIXA Studio (Via Wccftech), reporting from the Bilibili World 2023 exhibition in Shanghai, China, ASUS has shown off a new version of this cable-free graphics card. The word is that the company has decided to move this card out of the prototype stage and will begin mass-producing them very soon.
The card itself will use NVIDIA"s GeForce RTX 4070 GPU. It will have three fans and will come in either white or black colors. It will still use the regular PCIe Gen 4.0 x16 interface found in other cards, but will have a special slot that will be the power connector for the product.
The catch for this kind of power connection is that people who want this card will have to get a special ASUS motherboard for their PC as well. All of the power connectors for these motherboards will be in the back but with the custom power slot for the card.
ASUS will start mass-producing the cards and custom motherboards sometime this fall, which means they could go on sale sometime by the end of 2023 or the beginning of 2024. Expect the prices for both of these products to be higher than normal due to the custom and proprietary power connections.