A tweet from @fpsojisan_yt reveals that Palit is allegedly cutting the physical size of its PCIe connector in half for its RTX 4060 graphics cards. This change makes some sense as the RTX 4060 is only wired to use eight lanes of PCIe connectivity. At the same time, while the RTX 4060 ranks among the best graphics cards, it's mostly by virtue of being the least expensive Ada Lovelace architecture GPU from Nvidia.
All the RTX 4060 cards we're aware of have so far come with an x16 physical PCIe connector, even though the AD107 GPU (and AD106 on the RTX 4060 Ti) only uses eight lanes of connectivity. The remaining eight lanes are not electrically connected and are there more for stability. These cards from Palit are the first time we've seen an RTX 4060 with a cut down PCIe connector, and in fact it's a rare bird of a graphics card that has anything other than an x16 physical connector — even the RX 6500 XT and RX 6400, which only use four electrical lanes, usually have x16 connectors.
The neutered PCIe x8 interface is generally used to reduce manufacturing costs and reduce the physical size of the actual chip. External interfaces generally don't scale at all with newer process nodes, so dropping from 16 to eight or even four lanes can save on die size. This can be useful on lower-end GPUs like the 4060, since most graphics cards don't really take full advantage of an x16 interface, especially at Gen 4 speeds.
物理的に×8なってるやん pic.twitter.com/FAIedoLyLxJuly 13, 2023
