This could be very useful for ITX or SFF buyers who has very limited M.2 availability

The graphics card should actually have 2 M.2 slots, as if the GPU uses 8, and if the M.2 SSD can only use 4, then the other 4 lanes are basically not used.

The software 'fan control' for windows is absolutely perfect for this. You can set the GPU fans to spin up depending on highest temperature of either the GPU or the SSD, that way both will always be cooled as much as you want whenever necessary.

I absolutely love having cats make cameos in these videos. Also: for SFF builds this GPU is pretty slick, especially since the drive can run at Gen5 speeds. Thanks for the quick video!

Would love to see an x8 x8 bifurcation gpu with thunderbolt / usb4 next. Would massively up expandability for mini itx systems. Especially if the gpu natively routed one of the video ports over the usb c port internally

The cat was the best part of the video! 😂

You should have tested the ssd while the gpu was under load.

I love this. Not sure I'd ever buy it, but it's nice to see a gfx card manufacturer provide a genuinely new feature that users can use without requiring software to be updated to support it. Also, the storage is handy. With games getting larger, and AAA games sometimes being larger than 100 gig now, us gamers need all the fast storage we can afford.

PSA: This card has no builtin PCIe Bifurcation or Lane Splitting feature, you cannot use the ssd on motherboards which, again, do not have PCIe Bifurcation or Lane Splitting. I think card should have included that.

Love watching your videos not only for the content but the cats.

Perrfect ending, with the real star of the show ;p

Derbaur I saw you on some news recently you bought something expensive, crazy guy haha, hope you're well, another fantastic video as to be expected/usual.

Great review of an unusual product !

Thumbs for Shiek approval and also this coolstuff review! ^^)

Nice. This is mostly for small form factor PC like an ITX motherboard who only have one PCIe x16 slot and couldn't fit lots of M.2 slots in that tiny motherboard. Still, I hope that they can include to M.2 slot because it has 8 PCIe lanes, and 1 M.2 slot only use 4 lanes. My motherboard (Gigabyte X570 Aorus Pro v1.0) has a bifurcation setting of x8/x4/x4.

Love your cats appearance !

This would really be great for small form factor PCs, but also for ease of assembly. Instead of having to set up say, GPU, CPU, boot device, PSU, you can combine two of those into one unit.

More manufacturers should do this with x8 cards.

This is brilliant

This time the outro was the best

i think it was a cool idea and a decent sku for certain scenarios

ideas are limitless! we might even have a gpu w/ thuderbolt port in the future!

That's pretty neat. Definitely useful for MATX and SFF gang.

Installing all my games on the graphics card. GG's.

I have liked this video because your videos are good, and your orange tabby is featured front and center.

This is cool!

This sounds awesome for a compact photo editing rig. One more m.2 ssd can be significant.

Thanks nice review. I think that is quite inconvenient.

The conclusion chapter is simply purrfect

Your cat looks so much like mine when he just plops himself down on his side and rolls on his back :D

That's a nice slot for an M.2 AI TPU like Google Coral. Frigate NVR on ITX and a Jonsbo N2 NAS case comes to mind

While this is really just a space-saving measure, there is also the possibility that this _kind_ of design could better utilize something like Direct Storage for the sake of tighter timings and fewer bottlenecks. I'd really like to see this kind of concept pushed further to see what kind of gains we could get from it. Maybe we could see a day where all games saved on SSDs attached to GPUs have literally zero load times. It's still a good concept on its own without this, though. With PCIe generations continuing to double in bandwidth every two years or so, it will probably become unnecessary for even flagship video cards to use the full 16 lanes. So it makes a lot of sense to split lanes and put fifth-gen SSDs or higher on a device already designed with beefy cooling. Otherwise both the GPU and SSD coolers are gonna be fighting over the same real estate on the motherboard.

This looks amazing for getting those hot PCIe Gen5 NVMEs temperatures down inside size-constrained ITX builds.

This would be ideal for the blade type NUC PC's used in portable video and sound production, where there's a need to keep the mass and packaging as small as possible.

Hi der8auer, I'm anticipating the 4090 Matrix's second teardown of the pumphead/coldplate. I'm curious to see if they used a TIM in between. Since you own it now.

I wanna see, sometime in the future, using some of that ssd space turned into vram.

I don't know how exactly would be easiest, but I absolutely would love to see either 2 nvme, or the nvme be a cache for the gpu, because the whole direct storage thing is already a thing, and if you could design the card to take advantage of that, there could be something really compelling. The other idea just sounds great if you can support the funky bifurcation profile, but maybe that could be done with an IC of some kind, preferably not a switch though.

Very nice idea, since budget systems or itx do not have many lanes or m.2 slots.

with software like fancontrol you don't need such a bios switch. very nice piece of software

@3:05 what is that attached monitoring device? and where can I get one?

The calmest orange cat

I could find usage in small form factor ITX builds when you need more capacity. For example something like Plex media server.

Perfect place for your games drive

this is perfect for older office computers that have old motherboards

how would you find out which motherboard would allow you too split the top pci-e slot Roman ?

I wonder, could you hook up any other m.2 stuff, like a wireless chip like you find in laptops?

That cat had all my attention

How are the temps when running the OS and a game from the SSD from the GPU and the GPU at full tilt might intorduce heat issues on the SSD? (as the GPU and SSD are running at once), also the price would mean you are better off with a more expensive MOBO

Some boards only have one or two NVME slots, so this is nice to add storage without upgrading the board. Also on my board if I wanted to access my 2 NVME SSDs i'd have to remove my GPU (they are below it). The only accessible one with the GPU in is the third m2 slot. Moving the card isn't a big deal, but if all 3 slots are occupied, you can't add more unless you use a SATA SSD. So the option to pop in another NVME is a nice feature: i'd rather have functionality like this than more RGB for example.

i wonder if in combination iwth directstorage you can load in game textures much faster with this configuration

Maybe we'll see a GPU with an x8 E3 2T slot eventually. That could be a lot more flexible if they catch on.

What about SSD pci cards being run as an alernative to ram for cpu or for gpu? I have heard these are things already in prototype for servers and other aplications. Cant wait for the glass substrates to get thrown into this mix as well further reducing heat.

is the card able to acces textures much quicker because its closer to the gpu ? not to extend the gpu memory

I see this being useful for people who record gameplay.

Where does it draw its power from the pci e bus or does it also rely on Nvidias dodgy power connectors

This seems most useful to mITX scenarios. And most modern ITX boards usually have plenty of M.2 slots available for drives. I'm curious if this one is bootable. Also another interesting use case would be something like an M.2 10gbe or 2x2.5gbe NIC hanging off the video card.

8:30 I'd make contact with your thermal pet too 🤗

with HBM ram we could have space for all kinds of interesting connections and stuff on the back and end of the card

Honestly, I'm more excited about the cat than the GPU. Look at how cute it is on camera!

You can never have enough storage today - a great idea and when this becomes mainstream we will probably all be buying into it

how should that affect the overall heat for the GPU?

I share the cat's enthusiasm for this feature.

If mobo manufacturers and GPU manufacturers went full bore on this idea, it could be neat to see a 6090 only using 4 gen 6 lanes with 3 SSDs strapped to the back of it using the other 12 lanes.

@Der8auer, the fact that the card runs gen4 and the ssd runs gen5 is no surprise. The slot is gen5, but the card doesnt handle that so it just runs gen4. The pcie controller doesnt know the difference as backwards compatibility is so baked in 'it just works'. I noticed this on older systems many years ago with gen2 and gen3 before being able to select the generation in bios was s more common thing, the same happens with lane distribution, using a pcie x1 wifi card in a x16 slot has no issues other than its kind of a waste of realestate, the pcie controller just automatically adjusts accordingly. I am always amazed at how seamless pcie adjusts according to the situation compared to other connectivity technologies out there that require so much hand-holding to get it to work across different generations and bandwidth

you can mount a second gpu to the gpu with an m.2 adapter and have even more gpu

This is actually a useful thing for a card that is limited by lanes

Ah it's like the old creative sound blasters that had ram slots

is there a performance gain having 16 lane instead 8?

I wonder what the market would be for a pcie "daughterboard" with a nice big 1 slot or 2 slot cooler for NVME drives would be. Probably wouldn't be very expensive to make.

How much performance does the thermal cat add?

Very cool product.😮😊 Especially for ITX mobo users. To bad its only on 4060.

Why does every new addition to gpu features only get added to the low end releases, like premium features for premium cards

Very good Idea but just wondering if someone knows, i looked at my RTX 3060 TI and GPU-Z says ( PCIe x16 4.0 @ x16 1.1) and not what this GPU says as it says PCIe x8 4.0 @ x8 1.1. So why is a 30 series x16 and a 40 series is x8 and is that just for this 4060TI or others also without the extra SSD slot?

Where can i find tha Watts metter for gpu ?

I wanna see the m.2 drive used as a texture cache, or better yet, have 2 in raid0

honestly a decent idea as long as it doesnt add more than a few bucks to the card. probably really useful for some smaller builds

Does this work better on AM5 boards? they support bifurcation better than Intel boards right?

Hi, I have 3090 with 24 GB can you modifiy it to have 64 or 128 GB vram ?

When will be a video review and overcloking of orange cat?)

In this case personally I'd leave the card in quiet mode, but ONLY use that drive to store games. That way when your gaming and the video card heats up, and the fans kick in it also cools your game drive.

Happy cat!

with an extender/adaptor can you plug a graphics card into your graphics card?

Regards to the cool cat chilling out as if nothing is happening.

Even the most high end GPU like RTX 4090 doesn't need x16 PCIE 5.0 (it can run at X8 PCIE 4.0 without any bottleneck), i think adding M.2 slot on GPU is a good idea to utilize extra bandwidth from PCIE 5.0

Kitty cat was fighting sleep laying there 😆

And here I thought I could now expand my vram when needed lol

this would be really nice if the gpus switch over to pcie 5.0 and you can use the cooler for the 5.0 ssds cause then most gpus wont need more than x8

I don't want my storage and my video card tied together. What happens when I want to upgrade my video card? I have to find another one with this feature?

I wonder if it's possible for them to add 2 slots and use the whole X8 bandwidth available. Would that be possible? My B550 Aorus master has bifurcation available and I can even split my slots into X8/X4/X4 so I could theoretically use a X8 GPU and 2 SSDs. Just went into my BIOS to make sure of my bifurcation capability and I can do 2x8, 1x8/2x4, and x4/x4.

This card is 100% material for future "obscure, mostly useless but cool tech" kind of videos Roman is planning ahead and covering it before it becomes obscure and forgotten

Just image doing benchmarking on different motherboards\cpu and you just move this GPU with OS install between systems. It might be good for people doing lot's of testing.

Hey I have an RTX4060 and it shows that It always consumes 50w on HWinfo or GPU-Z (IDLE) Is it normal?? I know you have real tools to check, can you confirm? Because 50W is very high for idle..

Can we get a 10gbe NIC with m2 slot also?

next test is to see if it can hold games and run games (the SSD onboard being used for said games instead of OS/game drive)

the PCB view of the GPU indicates a bifurcation requirement for the M.2 slot (which is barely a thing on intel boards unless certain Z boards or workstation/server boards in general), but also wasted the last 4 lanes within the PCIE connector. could have just put one more slot in as i doubt 4060 is that hot to bear another second SSD in itself

the half of the x8 is not useless. If you split the pcie lanes, you'll definitely notice performance hits when you game with an SSD plugged into your gpu. I wonder where you came up with that, der8auer.

Makes me want to dust off a Aquacomputer KryoM.2, be kinda neat to get the same concept as this in a waterblock, using the same contact point on a GPU block to cool the SSD.

Best part of the video...was the cat!

Advantageous for cooling

Question: So, in your one video about the GIgabyte Aorus motherboard recently, you mentioned that it was a waste to have the pcie 5.0 nvme slot that would drop the gpu slot to 8x if used, but based on what you say in this video, it doesn't really matter since only half is used anyway correct? Thanks for the help.