This Zotac mini PC has an inventive way of ditching its RTX 5060 Ti's power cables, and no it's not the same as the Asus BTF way

I'll always be impressed with the shenanigans PC makers get up to to try and fit everything inside mini PCs. The upcoming Steam Machine is the most pertinent recent example of this, but, to crank up the enigmatic dial, every bespoke mini PC has its secrets. Case in point, the Zotac Magnus EN mini workstation with RTX 5060 Ti, which seems to power that GPU via the PCIe connector, and not in the same way as Asus BTF cards and motherboards.

The mini PC was disassembled and inspected by HKEPC, then brought to my attention by Unikoshardware and Wccftech. Apart from how impressive it is to be able to fit a discrete desktop RTX 5060 Ti into such a small chassis at all, one thing that sticks out is the complete lack of a power cable for the GPU.

Looking at GPU-Z shows something interesting: "Bus interface: PCIe x8 5.0 @ x8 5.0." Normally, for an RTX 5060 Ti, it would just show x 5.0. While I'm not sure what the "@" is all about, that's basically hinting that the x16 PCIe fingers are split into two batches of x8.

And upon closer inspection of the graphics card, it is in fact split in two. As Uniko and Wccf point out, the split-off part gets fed a 19 V input, as they're not being used for signalling, which can power the card, with the other PCIe lanes used for data transfer like normal.

You might already be thinking about Asus' BTF solution, which also draws power through fingers on the bottom of the graphics card. But these fingers are in addition to the x16 PCIe connector. This solution from Zotac instead splits the usual connector in two.

It can do this because the RTX 5060 Ti isn't a particularly power-hungry card, with a TDP of 180 W. If 19 V is pulled into the PCIe connector, that high of a voltage means each pin doesn't have to sustain a current that's too high. This, in turn, means temperatures don't need to be a worry for the connector, which is presumably why Zotac designed it to work like this in the first place.

It's all very inventive as a means of saving space. But saying all this, my colleague Nick points out that it's all very complicated and surely expensive when simply creating a custom PCB to mount it all could have done the job just as well.

"Expensive" is right, too, because looking at its China launch price, it's around $2,000. And I doubt that's for the full spec, given it can have up to 96 GB of DDR5-6400 RAM, and there's just a little bit of a memory supply crisis right now. That's mini workstations for you, I guess.

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