Asus Intros GeForce RTX 4060 Ti Video Card with Integrated M.2 SSD Slot

Most desktop class boards can only support bifurcating a 16x lane slot into two 8x lane slots, so it's more about preventing user error, as 2 M.2 slots would likely not function in most cases.

Even on server class hardware, the split options for a single slot are usually (but not always) 16x, 2* 8x, and 4* 4x - an 8x + 2* 4x option is somewhat unusual.

I would like to see mini-sas as well, but simply for being a bit more flexible in case design and potentially separating heat generating components instead of putting everything in the same box.

But the issue with GPU sag is AFAIK a different one. Jayz2cents had a pretty good video a while ago demonstrating how to fix sag on the case itself without one of the little stands. From personal experience I can say the Gainward Phantom 4090 doesn’t sag in a Fractal Torrent for example.

Back in the day "Infiniband" was going to be the successor to things like PCIe, such that you could network together discrete components and allow them to communicate/share their resources among multiple hosts.

Infiniband never took off though, though it's still around as a high speed networking interconnect (and gets active development for some industries like HPC).

Not my field, but high speed (high frequency) data transmission cables must overcome several factors related to the interferences caused by the current and voltage of surrounding wires through inductance, and also circumvent the signal degradation due capacitance, resistance and others within the wire per se. With nowadays' PCIe gens we would be talking about frequencies around 8Ghz, 16 GHz and the 32 GHz of the next generation.

When motherboards are designed, the interference and signal integrity between traces/lanes needs to be calculated and balanced for to avoid those issues, but I'm not sure could be done effectively with flexible electrical cables at PCIe frequencies.

But lets say the interferences and signal integrity were stable. I suspect that for to reduce the number of wires within the cables needed by the PCIe lanes -for to avoid the width of classical IDE hard drives cables or something rigid?- it would be needed to increase the speed of the data transmission for a serialized cable equivalent to the source PCIe parallelized lanes, with frequencies wildly higher.

So, as alternative we would be talking about an hybrid of optical data cables + clocking electrical wires then? but the latency/synchro introduced by the optical transceivers (that would need to work at higher frequencies than PCIe bus), each manufacturer using more optimal or less optimal optical transceivers from different brands, etc, I suspect that would introduce a new kind of issue invading the users forums (or maybe not, nevertheless I smell it) due such cables.

The matter is, maybe the above could reduce a bit the size of the motherboard, but not the volume occupied by the targeted devices (lets say GPU), it would be just for to repositioning those devices to a new place. so, although I do believe that the technology in general has been stagnant for a few years, in this case, IMHO, the GPUs are the problem, the GPU's manufacturers are not innovating at all, and due that the bricks.

Cases in the traditional "desktop" flat style have vertical GPU mounts for free. It's interesting that there's very little activity in that sector now, for fullsize motherboard support, especially since we've decided we no longer need to design a case around drive bays.

I do think the PCI-E to M.2 migration is getting a bit silly. My current mainboard has six M.2 slots, with four different levels of feature support (one intended for the preinstalled Wi-fi, one that can be SATA or PCI-E 3.0 x2, three PCI-e 4.0,4 one 5.0x4) Yet, if I said "I want a SCSI or SAS card", no dice, because there's only two x1 slots, and most cards seem to be x4.

The four-slot GPU problem might be more manageable if GPUs with AIO liquid coolerss included became more of a norm. That would at least let you move the majority of the bulk of the cooler away from the slot area. But usually this is reserved for ultra-expensive enthusiast cards.

Yes, it does, although DMA means the CPU will not need to process it. It's like any other M2 drive in your PC.

PCIe latency is a few orders of magnitude lower than NAND flash read latency, so the extra round trip to the CPU's PCIe root complex doesn't matter.

surely that data copy would not be on the fly, it would be preloaded, SSD's ~8GB/s could not keep up with GPU's ~350GB/s

nVidia generally disables/does not use ReBAR as it either shows no improvement or degrades performance. AMD may be a different story, but that isn't what this card is.

The article said it's for small form factor PCs - were the motherboards you were looking at designed for microatx or something similar?

A 2TB drive is what, 8-10 AAA games? More drive slots is always better.

Wow how do you keep your storage so low? I’m always running out of m.2 and SATA ports.

Most motherboards have a single dedicated M.2 from the CPU, a second one shared with the PCIe 4x slot and some have a third one from the chipset, usually slower. If you want a 10 Gbps NIC in your PCI 4x slot, second M.2 is gone and, if you don't have a third one from the chipset then you are limited to a single M.2 and Asus gives you the second one. That's exactly my case with one of the desktops, I would pay $10-20 extra for that extra M.2.

Will be pretty dope for eGPUs over thunderbolt

This looks to be using PCIe 5, which is 2x the bandwidth of PCIe 4. Considering a RTX 4090 is still using PCIe 4x16, so effectively the same bandwidth as PCIe 5x8, it should be fine.

No, for 4060 and 4060 TI the GPU is linked to only 8 of the 16 PCIe lanes, the other 8 are not used. Asus is using 4 of these unused lanes.

> Wouldn't this impact the performance of the GPU?

It isn't a super high performance GPU to begin with, so the narrower bus is unlikely to make much of a difference.

Isn't this the one DMA feature actually supported on consumer GPUs?

I know it's not possible for NICs to directly write data into GPU Memory unless one uses Quadro or data center cards, but loading stuff from nvme drives into the GPU without involving host memory should be possible on all recent GPUs.

Yes, it would destroy GPU performance.

> would that be hard to achieve?

Yes. Video memory runs on a substantially wider bus than system memory; the connectors that'd be required to make it replaceable would be extraordinarily expensive -- to the extent that it'd probably be cheaper to build the cards with their maximum complement of memory to begin with.

I feel like we need to rethink pc architecture entirely. GPU’s are so insane now that we almost need a motherboard on top of a motherboard, one for cpu and one for gpu where the gpu is also socketed and can be upgraded. Memory too. Would allow board makers to deliver better power solutions and have less coil whine. Thinking like a pi hat bolted on top. Having its own ram slots and whatnot. Or more realistically it would go on the back, and the motherboard would move closer to the center of the chassis versus being on one side. Graphics cards are huge and having a massive card hanging off a tiny little slot with a cooler that is oftentimes bigger than the cpu cooler is just insane to me. We are at the long tail of a perpendicular mounted card methinks. Can’t really take it much further. Vertical mounting will soon become a necessity so I think we need to go back to first principles and rethink from the beginning.

RAM stability is already pretty tough with modern speeds without putting it across a PCIe link.

Yeah that’s what I thought too. But there is a reason why we don’t have this in data centers. So my BS meter went off.

Regular PCIE kind of makes sense. Although, it’s a strange spacing optimization.