Asus Dual GeForce RTX 4060 Ti Hits Retailers With SSD Slot, Premium Pricing | Tom’s Hardware

The Asus Dual GeForce RTX 4060 Ti OC Edition 8GB with M.2 SSD has arrived at a number of retailers in Europe. Twitter PC hardware sleuth momomo_us spotted these quirky graphics card with a PCIe M.2 SSD slot at a trio of outlets in Northern Europe. We checked the outlets, which also all stocked the same Asus Dual GeForce RTX 4060 OC 8GB cards without the SSD expansion slot, and found cost premiums ranging from 7 to 19 percent for the onboard storage option.

The prices in the table above are not likely to bear much relation to retail prices in the US, but the mark-ups sought by the retailers could be echoed in the States; The $399 US consumers expect to pay for an Asus Dual GeForce RTX 4060 Ti OC Edition 8GB at places like Newegg, might see some inflation.

If US retailers follow the lead of those  in Northern Europe, we could see them try and pump up the prices from $399 to $427 (7% increase) or even $475 (19% increase). Hopefully, competition among US outlets will be strong enough to avoid such premiums. However, retailers may be paying a little more to Asus for these added M.2 SSD slot cards.

We first saw evidence of the Asus Dual GeForce RTX 4060 Ti OC Edition 8GB with M.2 SSD being prepared in the background back in July, when Asus demonstrated a prototype at a Chinese tech event.

There isn’t a lot to say about this RTX 4060 Ti 8GB on the GPU side of things, as we have seen and reviewed this SKU and it has charted among our best graphics cards of 2023.

The idea for adding storage onboard probably came from the fact that many people will be plugging these graphics cards into a PCIe 16x slot, but the GPU portion only uses eight PCIe lanes. In the prototype, we saw the extra bandwidth afforded dual M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 x4 slots. However, the blurb accompanying the release version of the Asus Dual GeForce RTX 4060 Ti OC Edition 8GB with M.2 SSD hints that there is “a” singular slot for extra storage. Another part of the Asus product text which was shared by momomo_us suggests that the M.2 slot is “capable of PCIe 5.0 speeds.”

Since July, when we warned about possible price hikes affecting this model, Asus has integrated a snap/slide-on cover for the M.2 drive, which is housed on the backplate area. This looks quite convenient for switching M.2 22-upto-80 drives. Moreover, Asus has built-in a Q-Latch so you don’t need to fiddle with screws when installing or switching the SSD.