Introduction

Here’s a kind of graphics card we’ve always wanted to see—the ASUS GeForce RTX 4060 Ti Dual with an M.2 Slot is a unique contraption that combines a graphics card with an M.2 NVMe SSD slot. The card features an M.2-2280 slot with full PCI-Express 5.0 x4 wiring that pulls the unused lanes from the card’s main PCIe interface, without any bridge or lane switches in between. The result is a fully-featured RTX 4060 Ti graphics card with uncompromised performance, plus the ability to put some unused PCIe lanes to use.

NVIDIA designed the RTX 4060 Ti GPU with a PCI-Express 4.0 x8 host interface. When installed in a motherboard with a full x16 PCIe slot, this results in 8 unused PCIe lanes, unless the motherboard is able to divert those lanes to a second x16 slot, or an M.2 NVMe slot of its own (as is the case with all Socket LGA1700 motherboards that feature a Gen 5 M.2 slot). This card has its first 8 lanes wired to the GPU, and the following 4 lanes wired to an M.2-2280 slot. For this to work, the motherboard must support PCIe lane segmentation, also known as “bifurcation.”

There are a couple of advantages to this card’s M.2 slot. For starters, the M.2 slot features Gen 5 wiring, so when installed on a platform with a PCI-Express 5.0 x16 slot, you get a ready-to-use Gen 5 NVMe slot; and second, this M.2 slot is guaranteed to be wired to the processor’s PCIe root complex, and not the chipset, so it should offer the highest possible performance. This card paves the way for other such innovative products in the near future such as, say, a graphics card with a PCIe x8 GPU and a Thunderbolt or USB4 controller that puts out a swanky 40 Gbps port with internal DisplayPort wiring from the GPU—the possibilities are endless when engineers are given a free hand!

The main function of this card is still that of a gaming graphics card, and the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti Ada occupies an important price point in NVIDIA’s product stack. It is designed for maxed out gaming at 1440p and 1080p resolutions, and since it’s based on the latest Ada Lovelace graphics architecture, you get all of NVIDIA’s latest features, including DLSS 3 Frame Generation. With this family of GPUs, NVIDIA has switched over to TSMC’s 5 nm EUV foundry node, which gives you next generation energy efficiency—the card only needs a single 8-pin PCIe power input to power the GPU.

The Ada Lovelace graphics architecture sees NVIDIA’s third generation of RTX, a breakthrough combination of gaming technologies that bring real time ray tracing to gamers; and performance improvements with DLSS. The new “Ada” CUDA core, in addition to increased IPC and support for new math formats, comes with support for shader execution re-ordering, which should benefit ray tracing workloads. The 3rd generation RT core, besides generational improvements to the ray intersection performance, adds support displaced micro-meshes, which increases the complexity of ray traced objects. The new Optical Flow Accelerator component assists in the generation of entire alternate frames entirely using AI, which is why DLSS 3 Frame Generation is exclusive to the RTX 40-series.

The GeForce RTX 4060 Ti nearly maxes out the AD106 silicon it’s based on, by enabling 34 out of 36 streaming multiprocessors physically present on the silicon. This works out to 4,352 CUDA cores, 136 Tensor cores, 34 RT cores, 136 TMUs, and 48 ROPs. The card’s 8 GB GDDR6 memory is installed across a seemingly narrow 128-bit memory interface, which is generationally halved from the 256-bit bus of the RTX 3060 Ti Ampere; but don’t fret—NVIDIA re-architected the memory sub-system with Ada to place greater dependence on large on-die caches, which should speed up the memory transfers.

Besides the M.2 NVMe slot, this card is practically identical in design to the ASUS RTX 4060 Ti Dual, the company’s affordable custom-design implementation of the GPU that’s positioned a notch below its TUF Gaming and ROG Strix RTX 4060 Ti cards. ASUS including a small factory overclock to a rated boost clock of 2565 MHz. The company is pricing the card at a $40 or a 10% premium over the $400 baseline price of the RTX 4060 Ti 8 GB, which should put it pretty close to the RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB variant that sells for $450. In this review, not only are we testing the card’s main GPU chops, but also the performance of its M.2 NVMe slot using popular Gen 4 and Gen 5 SSDs. We will be comparing SSD performance against various placement options on the motherboard, as well as an M.2 add-in-card card that sits on the motherboard’s second x16 slot, with lane switches along the way.