GPU ASRock Rack Unveils M.2 Slot Graphics Card

[BonfireOfDreams]

Related Article. I'm not excited about the actual product itself as it's simply x1 for vga (weird edge case use I imagine), but I am fascinated with the idea of how far the concept can go.

While more indirectly using m.2 for graphics isn't entirely new for this community (as a number of you have already used m.2 > PCI-e 3.0 x4 adapters), I'm interested to see if they do anything else with this idea for nuc/nuc-likes. Could help some poor on-board graphics situations. Perhaps it could even replace their Deskmini MXM solution at some point (Not that I'm expecting a 3080 to run on the m.2 form factor ).

 

[Cutterpaul]

Sorry to say this, but your link's dead.

It's really fascinating to me, that a 4x connection has as little a performance hit as it does.

 

[BonfireOfDreams]

Sorry to say this, but your link's dead.

Ope, it should be fixed now. Thanks for pointing that out!

 

[thewizzard1]

Looks very interesting for 2 things:
1. Laptop troubleshooting, systems with dead internal GPUs.
2. Internal display for cases, in ultra-high end systems. I've used USB for this in the past, though.

 

[BonfireOfDreams]

It's really fascinating to me, that a 4x connection has as little a performance hit as it does.

Not to mention, pci-e 4.0 m.2 is a pretty mainstream thing for parts coming out right now. Wonder how far off an m.2 pci-e 4.0 adapter would be from standard performance compared to the 3.0 adapter.

 

[Skripka]

Seeing a new product with VGA on it, in 2020 is moderately hilarious. I mean it is cool tech....but seriously, VGA??

I'm not at all sure what the intended market is here, since VGA has gone the way of the DoDo.

 

[robbee]

Seeing a new product with VGA on it, in 2020 is moderately hilarious. I mean it is cool tech....but seriously, VGA??

I'm not at all sure what the intended market is here, since VGA has gone the way of the DoDo.

This is probably intended for (temporarily) hooking up a monitor to servers. VGA is still mainstream in those environments.

 

[Skripka]

This is probably intended for (temporarily) hooking up a monitor to servers. VGA is still mainstream in those environments.

Do server boards even have m.2 slots these days? I don't follow that market at all; the few people have linked in SFF world are strange ITX server boards that don't have 'em.

 

[Phuncz]

ASRockRack is specifically a server/workstation (professional) brand spinoff from ASRock for consumers.
VGA is still common for servers and the Silicon Motion SM750 is geared towards embedded use for very simple 2D graphics:

Silicon Motion offers embedded graphics to enable embedded and consumer applications such as high resolution handhelds, point-of-sale terminals, medical equipment, multi-functional printers, casino gaming machines, industrial PCs, and servers.

If this had an A+E key M.2 connector, this would be able to be used instead of an M.2 wifi card on consumer boards. I needed this solution for my consumer hardware server, but I ended up with an A+E M.2 adapter to PCIe x1 as I didn't want to sacrifice those 4 PCIe lanes for troubleshooting purposes.