ASUS Is Launching A GeForce RTX 40 Card With No Power Cables, How It Works
If you pay any attention to technology news, particularly on this site, you may recall reading about ASUS' interesting power-delivery experiment one of the few times we've reported on it before. If you didn't read those stories, or don't recall, we'll recap: ASUS is about to start selling motherboards with rear-mounted power connectors and a unique "GC-HPWR" connector for the graphics card.
This GC-HPWR connector serves as the primary power delivery for the GPU, meaning that you don't have to connect any extra cables to the card. Of course, you have to connect those cables to the motherboard, instead, but the plugs for that are on the back of the board. That means they'll stay out of sight in typical builds, which is sort of the point of these products.
The parts coming soon from ASUS are marked as "BTF" or "Back-to-Future", although they're also part of the company's TianXuan (or "TX") series. Written as 天选 in Chinese and translating roughly to "Chosen One" or (as ASUS seems to prefer) "The One", the series is analogous to the Western TUF Gaming family, and it features hardware and laptops with design sensibilities styled after its mascot, an anime girl of some description.
The currently-announced products in the BTF family consist of a single GeForce RTX 4070 model and a matching B760 motherboard, known as the TX Gaming B760-BTF WiFi. There aren't many details about either product, but we know the motherboard will have three PCIe 4.0 M.2 slots, a PCIe 5.0 graphics slot, and support for DDR5 at up to 7200 MT/s. Notably, ASUS showed a Z790-BTF motherboard from its TUF series at Gamescom Cologne last month.
This report comes from China's IT Home, who says that the new GPU and its motherboard will show up tomorrow in the Asia Pacific region where the TianXuan series is primarily targeted. It's fairly unlikely that we'll see these teal-and-white boards in the west, but we may see the TUF versions if BTF proves to be popular overseas.
