At least 3 of all the motherboard companies are showing off their back-connect or back-mounted power connectors for a “no-wire” look and we’ve already covered MSI’s Project Zero and AORUS’ Project Stealth and as already seen earlier, ASUS has been seen working on their own back-connect motherboards. ASUS is trying out some concepts under the TUF GAMING line but they have a unique twist of their own.
First seen on earlier photos, the ASUS TUF GAMING B760M-BTF WIFI is ASUS’ back-connect motherboard conforming to the MAINGEAR standard of mounting all headers at the back including the 24-pin, the ATX/EPS-12V and all front panel headers and even SATA. As with all back-connect board, this requires a compatible case to allow connection of the reverse mounted plugs and to an extent the GPU to remove its power cable as well.
Here’s where ASUS does their own thing.
This unnamed concept Z790 board features hidden connectors as well but to eliminate the GPU power cables from the glass-side, ASUS is putting its own GPU power delivery solution directly on the board.
A closer look at the PCIe slot and you’ll see another connector on the far right. This is currently being dubbed as the “Megalodon” connector as it only currently fits the ASUS Megalodon RTX 4070. These connectors are proprietary but is stated to be able to deliver up to 600W of power, enough for an RTX 4090 should they build one.
But speaking of build, that means you can only use specific GPUs on the Megalodon connector. The example above is the ASUS Megalodon RTX 4070 and has the connectors on the board-facing side of the GPU. The good thing about this design is that if you have a non-compatible “Megalodon” card, you can still use a traditional card provided it doesn’t have any protrustion that could contact or harm the extra connectors. Otherwise, everything should work.
The demo build shows a very clean build with only that stupid AIO cable hanging out the front side.
