It’s official: PC component makers have declared war on cables. (That’s the cables that crisscross inside your PC case, specifically, not power/data cables in general or Marvel time travelers from the grimdark future.) The latest innovation comes from Asus, which has created a GPU-motherboard combo that straight-up erases the beefy power cable running from the graphics card to the power supply. Gordon Ung has a hands-on from the floor of Computex 2023.
Where’d the cable go? It’s actually a secondary header slot on the motherboard, sitting on the same “line” as the PCIe slot for the RTX 4070 graphics card. This extra slot looks like a teeny-tiny PCIe x1 port, but it can supply up to 600 watts of power — the same as the latest 12VHPWR cable from a PCIe 5.0-compliant power supply. Combined with the rear-facing power connections on the Z790 “hidden connector” motherboard itself, and the PC case with extra space behind the motherboard tray for the entire power supply, and you have a primary chamber that’s as clean as a whistle.
Asus is following a definite trend for PC building in 2023, including daisy-chained cooling systems from Corsair and the latest iteration of MSI’s Project Zero. Now if one of them can figure out how to erase the coolant lines between a CPU and an AIO radiator, we’ll be really impressed. For more live coverage of Computex 2023, be sure to subscribe to PCWorld on YouTube.
Author: Michael Crider, Staff Writer
Michael is a former graphic designer who's been building and tweaking desktop computers for longer than he cares to admit. His interests include folk music, football, science fiction, and salsa verde, in no particular order.