News Asus Flaunts GeForce RTX 4060 Ti with M.2 Slots for SSDs

[HideOut]

"The performance of Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4060 Ti is high enough to make the prototype one of the best graphics cards available. Adding two M.2-2280 slots will surely make it one of the most useful graphics boards." Said no one ever

 

[razor512]

Nvidia should just save up enough money to buy an RTX 4070 for their engineering team, and then have them reverse engineer the RTX 4070 to figure out how they were able to make the GPU utilize 16 PCIe lanes instead of 8, and then implement that same tech for the RTX 4060.

The crippling of the PCIe interface has a major impact on performance, especially in situations when dealing with shared memory use. One of the best improvements of PCIe 4.0 x16, was that for many games, you could utilize 1-1.5GB of shared memory without encountering major frame time issues. This means that if you are okay with a 20-30% performance hit your 8GB card could be used as if it were a 9-9.5GB card, and you would in the majority of cases have a smooth and consistent lower frame rate that will still be completely playable in situations where you are experiencing a VRAM capacity bottleneck and not a GPU compute botteneck.

Under older standards such as PCIe 3.0 x16, 1-1.5GB of shared memory would render the super majority of games unplayable.

 

[Li Ken-un]

The current hardware landscape is a huge waste of the PCIe 5.0 bandwidth that’s available on tap. Having the PCIe switch support 5.0 would be the ideal for this generation of hardware. The GPUs are all using only 4 or 8 lanes worth of PCIe 5.0 bandwidth but at 4.0 speeds.

So a switch that sat in front of a 4090 GPU would allow for 2 PCIe 5.0 M.2 slots, 4 PCIe 4.0 M.2 slots, or 8 PCIe 3.0 M.2 slots to come along for the ride. (Double those numbers for a GPU needing only 8 lanes worth of PCIe 4.0 bandwidth.) Heck, just give me U.2 connectors and I’ll hook them up to a fanned enclosure.

 

[InvalidError]

So a switch that sat in front of a 4090 GPU would allow for 2 PCIe 5.0 M.2 slots, 4 PCIe 4.0 M.2 slots, or 8 PCIe 3.0 M.2 slots to come along for the ride.

A PCIe 5.0 router chip with enough lanes to pass 5.0x16 through and enough spares to provide meaningful additional functionality will cost $300+.

Routing unused lanes from the x16 slot to NVMe slots hardly costs anything, albeit with the caveat that only motherboard-CPU combinations that support PCIe bifurcation on the x16 slot will be able to use them.

 

[thestryker]

Routing unused lanes from the x16 slot to NVMe slots hardly costs anything, albeit with the caveat that only motherboard-CPU combinations that support PCIe bifurcation on the x16 slot will be able to use them.

Intel consumer platforms only do x8 splits which means for the product to be viable it'd either have to be only 1 NVMe or need a bifurcation chip to handle the lane split.

AMD does support x4 modes, but I'm not familiar enough with it to know if it would do x8/x4/x4 mode (versus going into x4/x4/x4/x4) on a single slot without also needing a bifurcation chip.

 

[InvalidError]

Intel consumer platforms only do x8 splits

Both Intel and AMD used to be able to go down to x8x4x4. Got to love artificial product segmentation where vendors remove features to upsell people.

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AM5 supposedly still supports x4x4x4x4 for board manufacturers willing to implement BIOS support for it.

 

[thestryker]

Both Intel and AMD used to be able to go down to x8x4x4. Got to love artificial product segmentation where vendors remove features to upsell people.

Definitely, and I wish all platforms had bifurcation down to x1 (AMD does x2 on Epyc/TR and Intel is still x4 on Xeon) because that might incentivize vendors to include PCIe 5.0 x1 M.2 ports and maybe some drives to go along with them. As much as I hate M.2 as a format this would go along way towards allowing people to easily add storage.

 

[InvalidError]

Definitely, and I wish all platforms had bifurcation down to x1 (AMD does x2 on Epyc/TR and Intel is still x4 on Xeon) because that might incentivize vendors to include PCIe 5.0 x1 M.2 ports and maybe some drives to go along with them.

If bifurcation down to x1 happens on mainstream platform, it will likely be at the expense of USB3.x-gen2(x2)/USB4.x/TB and SATA ports in an HSIO format like it currently does for chipsets.

 

[palladin9479]

From the CPU's point of view, a PCIe lane is a PCIe lane, they really don't care. It's the BIOS that needs to determine which lanes belong to which device ID and enumerate them on bootup. So as long as the BIOS supports a more dynamic enumeration then it should be fine.

 

[InvalidError]

From the CPU's point of view, a PCIe lane is a PCIe lane, they really don't care. It's the BIOS that needs to determine which lanes belong to which device ID and enumerate them on bootup.

if the CPU only has two PCIe controllers associated with the x16 interface, as is the case with Intel's current LGA1700 chips, it can only be split two ways and there is nothing the BIOS can do about it. If you want to split the PCIe complement four-ways, you need four controllers to keep tabs on each port's resources.

 

[mrv_co]

One step closer to the GPU becoming a SBC.

 

[digitalgriffin]

As clever as this is, it just goes to show how crappy the 4060ti is with a x8 connector. God help you if you have PCIe 3

 

[digitalgriffin]

if the CPU only has two PCIe controllers associated with the x16 interface, as is the case with Intel's current LGA1700 chips, it can only be split two ways and there is nothing the BIOS can do about it. If you want to split the PCIe complement four-ways, you need four controllers to keep tabs on each port's resources.

A lane is a lane. It's up to the bios to determine how those lanes are used.

 

[InvalidError]

A lane is a lane. It's up to the bios to determine how those lanes are used.

A lane may be a lane but each lane needs to be associated with a bus controller to coordinate each N-lanes group and manage the port's IO. You cannot split PCIe lanes into more chunks than there are controllers available to manage them. Four controllers, four devices max no matter how many PCIe lanes there are.

Same thing with PCIe switches: Microchip's PM50100A has 100 PCIe lanes but they can only be divided into up to 26 groups, which means you have to use at least x4-wide partitions if you want be able to use all 100 lanes. The smallest version has 28 lanes and only supports 8-ways bifurcation, which means you still have to use mostly x4-wide partitions to use all lanes. Basically, even the chips designed to let you have more PCIe devices don't really allow you to bifurcate less than four lanes at a time.

 

[Tac 25]

replying to the OP post.

hmm, that looks interesting. More SSD slots.

 

[_Shatta_AD_]

Yes the pcie slot provides 75 watts of power, the eight pin 150W and you have the card eating 160W ...leaving an eye watering 65W by ssd standards. More than enough power to run 6 M.2 drives at full tilt (assuming max 10W on writes) if there had been enough PCIe lanes left to use that excess wattage. But not everyone identifying as an enthusiast is going to know all those exact numbers off the top of their head...though they should have some guesstimates in the ball park to be fair. Yet that's also not including those readers who aren't enthusiasts and don't know any better. Point being I'd say its a fair call on the author's part to include such language all things considered. But I do get where you're coming from don't get me wrong.

That said, its not a very interesting product imo. Something with a direct connection to the the GPU would have perked my ears but this is just adding an extra m.2 slot by leeching of the vacant lanes left from a overly gimped gpu. Niche at best and some what of a curiosity therefore but there's not much interesting beyond that. To be fair though we'd need Nvidia involved directly to get something like a direct GPU to onboard m.2 slot/ssd interface, not just an AIB partner.

Not interesting you say? Tell that to compact PC owners utilizing Mini-ITX mobos with single PCIe x16 slot and max 2 m.2 NVMe slots. And yes I’m aware that there are ‘newer’ mITX mobos that carry 3x m.2 slots but that’s still 1 less and not to mention sacrificed connectivity elsewhere to provide say extra slot. For mainstream/lite-enthusiasts that do not require the power-hungry RTX-4070 and above GPUs while maximizing PCIe lane utilization on mainstream mITX mobos, this card would be a God send! Like I’ve been wondering since 2018 why GPU designers don’t implement something like this considering there are numerous m.2 expansion cards out there but no hybrid options.