ASUS China Made An Experiment: Attaching RTX 4090 To The RTX 4060 Ti

ASUS China Made An Experiment: Attaching RTX 4090 To The RTX 4060 Ti

If you read the title just now, you’re probably asking if the title made any sense. Here’s some context: ASUS China previously revealed a special variant of the RTX 4060 Ti DUAL card (which was recently announced globally) that features an SSD slot behind the GPU. The rationale for such a design includes easier slot accessibility, making use of the unused PCIe lanes on the x16 connector itself, and lower temperatures thanks to more exposed airflow.

However, there’s also one more use that this GPU is (not quite) designed for: attaching a full-fledged RTX 4090 GPU through the M.2 slot behind the card. ASUS China’s General Manager, Tony Yu (known as Uncle Tony in Chinese tech circles), recently released a video demonstrating such a contraption. Before that though, the video began with a more conventional use of PCIe 5.0 SSD, which this GPU is designed for – as long as the host system supports PCIe 5.0.

The testing on SSD reveals very respectable results – with the Crucial MP700 PCIe 5.0 SSD under full load, the temperature sustained at around 50°C while delivering over 12GB/s of throughput. That said, I know you’re here for the mad scientist part, so here’s how it went down.

For the GPU Frankenstein setup, Uncle Tony has brought out a PCIe riser that terminates to the M.2 (PCIe x4) connector, to which the ASUS ROG STRIX RTX 4090 Evangelion GPU is attached to. It worked – although there likely are some performance penalties given the PCIe lanes, even at its PCIe 5.0 x4 standard (effectively PCIe 4.0 x8 for the GPU), is insufficient to utilize its full performance. A quick reminder, PCIe 5.0 x4 is also equal to PCIe 3.0 x16, and since RTX 3090 we have exceeded that protocol’s bandwidth limits.

It’s worth reminding that this is nothing more than a “what if” experiment, and of course no one recommends this way of installing a GPU. However, using the RTX 4060 Ti DUAL SSD as designed, with a PCIe 5.0 SSD, is a pretty sound idea given the benefits it offers.

Source: Wccftech

Pokdepinion: Perfectly pointless experiment – and I like it.