If you own an X299 motherboard from Asus, you might interested in the company's new Hyper M.2 x16 riser card. The new offering is essentially a daughter-board supporting up to four PCIe 3.0 M.2 SSDs for blazing fast file transfers.
What's at play here is Intel's Virtual RAID (VROC) technology. Using this card, you can add a handful of NVMe SSDs to your system and run them in RAID 0. Other types of RAID are supported as well, though only if you purchase an Intel activation key.
The other caveat is compatibility. Asus lists the card as being compatible with the following motherboards:
- ROG Rampage VI Extreme
- ROG Rampage VI Apex
- ROG Strix X299-XE Gaming
- ROG Strix X299-E Gaming
- Prime X299-Deluxe
- Prime X299-A
- TUF X299 Mark 1
- TUF X299 Mark 2
There's also some uncertainty about drive compatibility. Back at Computex, Intel stated that VROC would only work with certain Intel drives, leaving out third-party solutions from the likes of Samsung and others.
All that aside, this riser card offers up to 128 Gbps of bandwidth, and therein lies the main selling point.
"An insane number of drives can run in parallel across multiple VROC cards to deliver staggering throughput and massive capacity for system drives, scratch disks, and anything else you want to access at warp speed," Asus says.
The card also a features a large heatsink with a fan inside providing active cooling.
There is no word yet on pricing.
