ASUS today unveiled its new PCIe X16 Hyper M.2 card, a new card that allows us to install four M.2 NVMe storage drives up to 22110 and allowing RAID 0, 1 and 10 configurations.
This new card comes with a large aluminum heatsink that makes contact with the four units, which is dissipating actively by a small turbine that has been installed on the innermost side of the card with the aim of extracting air from the interior to expel it to the outside. This card makes use of the 16 PCIe lines, so it will be necessary to connect it to a port that can electrically offer them so as not to limit the bandwidth of the installed SSD disks.
Asus Zenbook UX410 A 14-inch Ultrabook
PCIe x16 Hyper M.2 card specifications
One of the innovations of this card is that it has support Intel VROC. Also, that comes with a new feature of the processors Skylake X and the X299 platform. That allows the CPU to manage more directly this type of cards with NVMe storage devices. Also allowing the RAID configurations as boot disks. Unfortunately, this feature is only supported by Intel SSD and requires a special key cable in some types of configurations.
It is a VROC-compatible (Virtual RAID over CPU) model. That takes advantage of unused PCIe CPU tracks to be allocated to storage. So it will have use with Core X enthusiast processors.
ASUS ROG STRIX RX Vega graphics card specifications
That allows it to be able to run at a speed of up to 128 Gbps. So, skipping the limitation of 32 Gbps imposed by the HDMI connection of the chipset. The adapter includes a small fan to keep SSD temperatures at bay. The size of the adapter is approximately 202 × 96 × 13 mm. It is compatible with motherboards VROC, such as:
- ROG RAMPAGE VI EXTREME
- ROG RAMPAGE VI APEX
- PRIME X299-DELUXE
- PRIME X299-A
- ROG STRIX X299-E GAMING
- TUF X299 MARK 1
- ROG STRIX X299-XE GAMING
- TUF X299 MARK 2
This new card has a cost of about € 55, while VROC keys cost around € 100 for Standard and € 249 for Premium.