Asus Dual GeForce RTX 4060 Ti SSD OC review

Barring an unforeseen late arrival, the Nvidia, AMD and Intel GPU families are complete for this generation. The underlying GPUs are a well known quantity at this point so now it's just a case of seeing what fun things board partners can do to differentiate their cards from the rest of the market. 

But it's one thing to release an RTX 4060 Ti 8GB model with a factory overclock or a marketing tie-in, but one with an SSD slot? Well, that's something else entirely. Asus has done just that, releasing an RTX 4060 Ti 8GB with a built-in PCIe Gen 5 SSD slot. Now that's innovation.

Apart from that key innovation, the Asus Dual GeForce RTX 4060 Ti SSD OC Edition 8GB is an otherwise unremarkable RTX 4060 Ti graphics card. Asus' Dual cards are aimed at mainstream buyers. As the name suggests, it's a dual fan option that eschews fancy bling or an unnecessarily large cooler in favor of value for money. In this case, the RTX 4060 Ti's 160W TDP is a natural fit for a no-frills, dual fan cooler. Spending more money on a fancy cooler is pretty much a waste on a card in this class.

So, what sets this card apart is the inclusion of that PCIe Gen 5 x4 M.2 SSD slot. The slot is incorporated into the backplate on the rear of the card. As the RTX 4060 Ti only makes use of a PCIe Gen 4 x8 interface, adding an M.2 slot is a clever way to take advantage of PCIe lanes that would otherwise be lost when using an eight lane card in a 16-lane slot. 

It's a smart solution that adds extra Gen 5 SSD capability to systems that lack multiple dedicated Gen 5 SSD slots, which is pretty much all of them right now. And that's needed if you're to make the most of a speedy Gen 5 SSD's sequential transfer speeds. Small form factor systems are another good use case. A Mini-ITX system with a single motherboard SSD slot would thus gain a second one.

The GPU part of the Asus Dual RTX 4060 Ti SSD 8GB is a well known quantity at this point. It's built around the AD106 GPU. It includes 4,352 CUDA cores, 136 Tensor