ASUS Reveals its USB4 Add-in Card with 60 Watt USB Power Delivery Support

Back at Computex last year we got a look at the first USB4 add-in card, which was from MSI. Some six months later, ASUS has finally revealed its USB4 add-in card that simply goes by the name of USB4 PCIe Gen4 Card. The general design of the two cards appear to be more or less identical, at least in terms of outputs and inputs. As such, both cards feature two USB4 outputs and two DP 1.4 inputs for those that want to use the USB4 ports to connect to a display. Other inputs include a USB 2.0 header, a custom USB4 header for communication with the motherboard—similar to Thunderbolt add-in cards—and a 6-pin graphics card type power input. The card supports up to two monitors and three devices or one monitor and four devices when daisy chained.

ASUS has gone for a shroud on its card, so it's impossible to make out any real details, but based on the manual, ASUS has installed a heatsink on the ASM4242 USB4 host controller from ASMedia, albeit a smaller one than MSI. However, ASUS has only gone for 60 W USB Power Delivery compared to 100 W for the MSI card. If this makes any useful difference in a desktop PC is up for discussion though and would depend on specific use cases. On the other hand, ASUS allows for 60 W through both ports, whereas MSI only delivers 27 W through its secondary port. The card should work with any ASUS motherboard that has a TB/USB4 header. As ASUS has only just put up the product page, there's no word on pricing.