I’ve seen these hidden connector motherboards at various events, but never actually had one in the office before, and wow, they do look strange, but a good strange.
As you can see, there are no power connectors at all on show, as they’re all on the reverse of the motherboard.
You can still see some of the solder points, but again, they just look like the back of the PCB rather than the front.
This ASUS GPU even has hidden connectors, notice there’s a second strip of connectors in line with the PCIe connectors?
The 12VHPWR connection is hidden on the back of the motherboard and passes power through this secondary connector to the GPU.
That means there are no 12VHPWR or 6+2 pin connectors on the outward face of the GPU, making it one of the cleanest-looking modern GPUs I’ve ever seen.
Behind the motherboard, you can see there are CPU power connectors, the 24-pin, GPU connectors, fans, ARGB and much more, it’s all hidden, so cable routing is done as standard.
My only concern is that the 12VHPWR doesn’t like to be bent, and those cables can be rigid, so get a 90-degree adaptor if you have access to one.
With all the cables connected, it’s certainly a little more crowded back here than usual, but overall, I think it still looks pretty usable.
As I thought, the 12VHPWR isn’t too happy with bending, so while there is a lot of room behind the motherboard, I would strongly recommend getting a 90-degree connector for this, as it could save you some headaches in the future.
The 24-pin fits just fine though, so no issues there. And I love the fact that even fan and RGB connectors are all around the back.
Overall, a very clean and tidy-looking setup, so let’s get the rest of the components in there and get the power turned on!
With a cooler installed, you can see there’s plenty of room in here for a decent-sized air cooler.
I love air-cooled builds, so being able to get a taller tower in here is certainly welcome.
Having two 140mm fans in the front and a 140mm fan in the back is great for airflow, and you can really feel it throughout the case, as there’s so much ventilation on the bottom, front, top and back of the case, that there’s a lot of air pulling through the case, even with the fans at lower RPM and running quietly.
It still looks weird having no cables there, but hey, even if you did have cables here, there are cable-routing grommets in all the right places.
This case does support vertical GPU mounting, but you’ll need a riser cable (not included). That being said, having a zero-cable design on the GPU looks pretty amazing, especially since this is an RTX 4070 Ti, not some low-power budget GPU, so that’s pretty dope.
There’s ventilation everywhere, and this looks cool visually, but anything that prevents hot spots throughout the case is always welcome anyway.
Even with a large graphics card in here, there’s plenty of room up in the front or the top of the case for additional cooling. If you wanted a couple of radiators in here, it’s certainly not going to be an issue.
With the glass back in place, you can see your build very clearly, as there’s no tint to the window. Of course, with such clean cable routing, or a complete lack of any cables to look at, it’s easy to be proud of your building skills here.
Plus, the RGB fans are nice and bright, but since they’re recessed quite a bit behind the front panel, they mostly light up the case, rather than project into the room, which is great, as I like my RGB, but I don’t like my PC lighting up my room like a disco.
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