Never short of ideas, the Taiwanese company surveys customers and partners before launching any mass production.
Over the years, graphics cards have come to consume impressive amounts of electricity. Thirty years ago, cards required no special power supply: they drew their energy from the expansion port connecting them to the motherboard. Then, the first models imposed the use of a hard drive power cable, since nothing specific was provided. Today, all power supplies provide two, three, even four or more PCIe cables for graphics cards that can gobble up 300, 400 and even more than 500 watts in very special circumstances.
The motherboard needs a new 8-pin slot to power the PCI Express slot © ASUS
Such power-hungry monsters are not the direct focus of ASUS' project, but that doesn't make the brand's prototype uninteresting. ASUS's idea is to deliver up to 250 watts without the need for a power cable to be connected to the graphics card... just like in the good old days! And 250 watts may not sound like much, but it's enough for most entry-level cards like the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti TUF Gaming used by ASUS in its demonstration. The card is plugged into a rather unusual ASUS TUF Gaming motherboard: the brand has added an 8-pin power port on the bottom. This port must be connected to the power supply.
On the graphics card, one end of the PCI Express port is modified to handle this power supply © ASUS
Of course, ASUS's idea isn't to rain down watts as if by magic. The graphics card is powered by the PCI Express port, which is modified at the front of the PCIe connector, as you can see in the photos. Next, the motherboard is modified to carry more current: the 8-pin power port previously connected to the graphics card is now deported to the motherboard. Of course, this requires the design of slightly more resistant motherboards, but it also simplifies the overall operation of the PC: the motherboard already has its own power supply, to which is added one or two 8-pin ports for the CPU and, therefore, an 8-pin port for the graphics card. It remains to be seen whether this idea will catch on...
