ASUS has showcased a new concept graphics card and motherboard that can deliver up to 250W of power directly from the PCIe slot, paving the way for power connector-free graphics cards.
If ASUS's New Graphics Card & Motherboard Concept Comes To Life, The Majority of GPUs May Just Start Shipping Without A Power Connector
ASUS has made some interesting innovations when it comes to cable-free designs on graphics cards and motherboards. Their BTF series, which puts all connectors to the back of the motherboard & GC High-Power solutions for graphics cards are widely available. The company also showcased its 1000W BTF 2.5 connector at Computex 2025. But the company continues to evaluate and test new solutions.
In a new video shared by ASUS's China manager, Tony Yu, the company demoed a new concept design that may lead to a connector-free GPU design. And by connectors, we are referring to the power inputs.
ASUS shares its progress in the connector-free era and showcases how the current PCIe Gen5 standard hasn't evolved in the power management area. The PCIe slot still delivers 75W of maximum power, which is unable to meet the power requirements for a majority of mainstream cards. While certain low-end GPU solutions do feature a <75W TDP, entry-level designs such as the RTX 5050 consume over 100W at peak loads. So you need an extra connector to maintain stability.
Now the 12V ATX supply on the motherboard can be used to offset the power requirement, but that is also not enough since it drives your fans and RGB headers. So the extra power has to come from somewhere else. How about the PCIe slot?
Well, as mentioned above, one PCIe slot, regardless of the standard (Gen 3, Gen 4, Gen 5), still features up to 75W power delivery. The larger portion of the slot is used for data transfer, while the smaller portion at the front offers power to the AIC.
ASUS overcomes this barrier by designing its own concept PCIe slot solution on the graphics card and motherboard. This new slot adds more points to the gold finger, allowing for up to 250W of power. A total of 3 points are added on the front, and two points are added on the back of the gold finger. The gold finger looks denser and similar to the GC_HPWR connectors, so we can see a solution with even higher wattage in the future or by the time this concept comes close to an actual launch.
But it's not just the graphics card that will be getting a PCIe design change; the motherboards need to be updated, too. ASUS has also made a concept motherboard which features a Gen5 x16 slot with denser, thicker, and more conductive pins on the front to support the 250W power capability. These fingers can be seen with the gold texture on the motherboard.
And lastly, to feed this power requirement from the PSU, ASUS's motherboards already come with a supplementary 8-pin connector that can feed more power to the PCIe slot and other IO. This delivers up to 150W of power too. So all in all, these new changes can drive up to 250W of power. Other board vendors, such as MSI, also offer a supplementary power connector (8-Pin) on their products. MSI has been doing this for a while, and we've already seen the benefits of how this connector can offer stable & max current in PCs that are running multiple GPUs, etc.
In the demo, ASUS showcases a TUF GeForce RTX 5060 Ti Gaming concept graphics card with this new design, running entirely on PCIe power and drawing up to 248W of power without any issues.
Once again, the ASUS PCIe connector-free design is still a concept. But it can lead to a future where the majority of graphics cards in the sub-300W range can feature no power connectors at all. This will lead not only to neater setups but also to the end of some of the concerns associated with the newer 16-pin power connectors, since plugging those cables incorrectly can lead to major flaws. The downside is that you might require a motherboard that supports these graphics cards with the right PCIe slot, but let's wait & see if we see this adopted or similar designs pop up in the future.
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