ASUS Shows Off RTX 4070 With No Power Cables
Jakob Aylesbury / 1 year ago
ASUS has shown off an RTX 4070 card which does not use any power cables or adapters at all, possibly a new standard for GPU power.
ASUS RTX 4070 Megalodon Concept
The ASUS RTX 4070 Megalodon Concept with no power cables has been shared by wccftech on their tour of ASUS HQ. Alongside its new 2.3 slots triple fan cooler design is the unique method of providing power to the card through a special PCIe style slot on the rear side of the card. This connector connects to a port on the motherboard named “GC_HPWR” and is capable of delivering 600W. For the demo, ASUS had a TUF Z790 board with this connector but also with the various other motherboard connectors on the back of the board like many other cable-less boards we have seen in the past. When it came to hiding cables the graphics card was the difficult one to handle, but with this method where the PCIe power cables are input into the rear of the motherboard and fed through this new connector, hiding the cables looks to be easy.
Could This Catch On
Over time we are seeing more boards tested in this hidden cable format with brands slowly seeing if there is a market for such a design, especially considering how difficult it is to pull off. For this to catch on you need motherboard manufacturers, GPU manufacturers and case manufacturers to all agree on a standard design and then produce all those products making it quite a difficult market to create. I’d love for it to catch on but I just don’t see it happening on a global scale any time soon.
Pricing?
The other big factor around this catching on is the pricing. For these designs, there are additional manufacturing costs meaning that the price of these cards and motherboards as ASUS has stated, will be a lot more than the current standard boards. For now, we just have to wait until these companies decide that there is a market for such products and hopefully, they all stick to one design because i can see this being an ASUS proprietary design locking you into both an ASUS motherboard and GPU.
