Since PCIe’s inception in the early 2000s, the high-speed connectivity standard has been limited to 75 watts of peak power from the physical slot. This is enough to power some entry-level graphics cards from the physical slot alone, but most graphics cards require auxiliary power to get enough juice. However, Asus wants to change that — IT Home reports that the GPU maker has teased a new concept design allowing the PCIe slot to deliver a whopping 250 watts of power output through modifications to the PCIe front finger.
The concept reportedly takes advantage of the unused part of the front PCIe finger to triple power output. The five 12V lines attached to the PCIe finger are “merged”, with each line featuring enhanced width and thickness as well as more conductive materials to boost the slot’s current-carrying capacity.
Top-down images of Asus’ modifications show the changes; the five 12V pins at the front are significantly larger, to the point where they are visible to the naked eye. This is in contrast to a regular PCIe slot, where the pins are so small that they are virtually impossible to spot. To feed the modified PCIe slot, most of the additional power is allegedly fed by an extra 8-pin PCIe connector on the motherboard.
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Asus’s PCIe concept could finally make cableless graphics cards more mainstream, assuming adoption is high. PCIe’s 75-watt limit has left all but the most power-efficient entry-level graphics cards as the only mainstream GPUs that can do away with auxiliary power cables.