It’s official: PC part makers have declared warfare on cables. (That’s the cables that crisscross inside your PC case, particularly, not energy/knowledge cables generally or Marvel time vacationers from the grimdark future.) The newest innovation comes from Asus, which has created a GPU-motherboard combo that straight-up erases the beefy energy cable working from the graphics card to the ability provide. Gordon Ung has a hands-on from the ground of Computex 2023.
The place’d the cable go? It’s truly a secondary header slot on the motherboard, sitting on the identical “line” because the PCIe slot for the RTX 4070 graphics card. This additional slot appears to be like like a teeny-tiny PCIe x1 port, however it could provide as much as 600 watts of energy — the identical as the newest 12VHPWR cable from a PCIe 5.0-compliant energy provide. Mixed with the rear-facing energy connections on the Z790 “hidden connector” motherboard itself, and the PC case with additional house behind the motherboard tray for your complete energy provide, and you’ve got a main chamber that’s as clear as a whistle.
Asus is following a particular pattern for PC constructing in 2023, together with daisy-chained cooling techniques from Corsair and the newest iteration of MSI’s Challenge Zero. Now if one in every of them can determine how one can erase the coolant strains between a CPU and an AIO radiator, we’ll be actually impressed. For extra reside protection of Computex 2023, you’ll want to subscribe to PCWorld on YouTube.