BTF and GC-HPWR
You might have heard of Asus’s “BTF” GPU or “BTF-compatible” motherboards. A common misconception is that it is yet another one of those Asus’s gimmicky closed non-standard thing. It’s not. The BTF 2.0 connector, as their marketing department calls it, is actually called a GC-HPWR/GC-HPCE connector.
It was completely developed and patented by Asus. But, and this is a big but, it is a royalty-free open standard under patent. Meaning, even though it is legally proprietary, any other company, under Asus’s terms, should be able to just implement the exact same compatible connector and get the exact PCB layout and the knowledge to work with GC-HPWR.
That is why, though made by brands lesser known to western markets, other GPUs with GC-HPWR exist. Colorful implements their GC-HPWR and markets it as “Ultra Z” while Sapphire markets theirs as “PhantomLink”.
Back-plugging
You might be wondering: why did they spend all that effort just to change the position of the power connector on GPUs? Were they precognizant of the diasater that is 12VHPWR connector? I mean yeah afaik there has been zero instance of GC-HPWR connector melting, and even considering the connector design, a flat card edge/gold finger connector surely should be better at managing larger load than tiny pitch inside plastic square holes.
Actually, no. They did not start this route for the melting cables. The main term of this movement in the place where it’s most researched and adopted, China, is called “背插”, the literal translation of which is “back-plug”. This is because the first iteration of this movement, which was then dubbed BTF 1.0 was moving all connector receptacle on the mother to the back side, so you “back-plug” like you plug them in from the back. As time goes on and people got more ambitious, the Chinese term 背插 stuck around while the English term settled on BTF mostly because it was Asus who pioneered and developed all the necessary stuff at the time.
The ape behind the vision
Note: If you understand Chinese you should watch this video instead and skip to next section because this section is mostly just going thruogh it.
Now we know BTF 1.0 is to hide cables better for asethetics while BTF 2.0 involves a brand new power delivery connector, what is BTF 3.0 gonna be? Now you may be wondering, what is these all for? The real story goes as far back to over a decade ago and it all originated from one single Chinese Bilibilier(YouTuber equivalent in China).
It was 2015, there was a PC building enthusiast named 远古时代装机猿(DIY-APE) who had conceived an idea: to put all cables inside a PC onto the PCB boards directly. He was met with ruthless mockery. Four years later, when he saw the 2019 Mac Pro with the MPX card edge power connector, he realized that maybe he wasn’t so crazy after all.
Even feeling vindicated, he felt inspired still. He knew deep down an industry such as PC building is so complex and constrained that only a fool would think that designing a PC that’s built with no cables like that 2019 Mac Pro is feasible, but he decided that he’d be such a fool.
He didn’t have much funding, the technical knowledge, nor any experience. However, he was the top 100 content creator on Bilibili, and he was especailly popular among the Chinese PC building community. He had influence.
So he started using his soft power to lobby various major manufacturers to make collab products. He initially collabed with Maxsun and Colorful to make some prototypes and these stirred up much interest in the Chinese PC building community.
In addition, in order to ease the concerns of manufacturers, he himself filed a bunch of patents about the back-plug connector layout and had agreed in the first place that he would license them out for free, thus creating an “open standard” that people can use without paying extras but still have a unified and standardized reference.
The first real manufacturer that jumped on board was Asus who released ASUS DIY-APE B660 REVOLUTION in 2022, a motherboard with all connectors on the back of the PCB board. In 2023, MSI and Maxsun joined the suite by releasing motherboards also with all connectors on the back.
Soon, seeing how popular they’re received, Asus recognized the potential of this market and immediately expanded their operation on this front and kicked off their BTF line, and this line of motherboards with connectors on the back side would be later known as BTF 1.0.
Asus and gold fingers
After the success of BTF 2.0, Asus tackled perhaps the most challenging problem of this entire evolution, GPU power delivery. 2019 Intel Mac used the MLX module power connector is completely closed and proprietary, so that’s a no go. Asus had no option other than cooking up something their own.
Luckily something was right in front of their eyes all this time. In case you didn’t know, though not as big as Dell, HP, or Lenovo, Asus is also a player in the server computer industry.
What we usually see in a consumer built PC, there are these “gold fingers” connectors, also known as card edge connector, on PCIE CEM, RAM outlines, and m.2 connectors are all considered gold fingers.
In a desktop PC, we usually use gold fingers connectors for data transmission. However
To return to the quesiont of what it is all for: a DIY version of the 2019 Mac Pro, and the endgame is a PC with a singular cable connecting between the chasis and the motherboard.