The “War on Cables” trend rages on and Asus is on the front lines. In 2023 and 2024, Asus eagerly embraced the trend with “BTF” motherboards and cases designed to stealthily hide cables around the rear of desktop PCs, but designs shown off at CES 2025 indicate that they could step things up a notch soon. How so? A massive graphics card power connection right on the motherboard.
It wouldn’t be Asus’ first attempt at the concept. The company’s BTF designs include an existing, proprietary connection that can power a specially designed RTX 4070 Ti or 4090, up to 600 watts. But the next-gen version of this design steps it up to 1,000 watts — a full kilowatt going through the motherboard without cumbersome power rails snaking towards the front of your pristine PC case. That’s according to designs shown to HardwareLuxx (via VideoCardz.com).
In addition to a higher power throughput and lower temperatures, the new version of the GC-HPWR connection is markedly different than the original BTF design. This upgraded version uses a removable connection component, a bridge between the motherboard and the recessed connection on the GPU.
Asus
The advantage here is that you can remove it from the GPU to make said card compatible with non-BTF motherboards, whether from Asus or other manufacturers, thanks to standard PSU rail connections on top of the card. This also means that standard, non-BTF graphics cards from Asus or other manufacturers would be easier to install on a BTF-equipped motherboard. It’s the best of both worlds.
All of this work is still in the design stage so far, or at least that’s all that Asus felt comfortable showing off at CES 2025. If we’re going to see more of this tech in 2025, I’d expect it to show up at Computex in May.
