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 travels 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.
