Cable management is one of the banes of the PC building world. Anyone who has assembled their own machine has struggled with the myriad of cables required to run their machine. First of all, you have to make sure that everything can actually be plugged in, which is not always easy depending on your configuration. Then there is hide all evidence (opens in a new tab) that has never been done.
Often this involves stuffing all those loose bits of cable into a hidden pocket on the back of the case, but PC parts manufacturers don’t really make that easy, with all those ports on the front of the motherboard. Just make several forgo cable management (opens in a new tab) absolutely. That might be about to change, with a new motherboard from Asus cleverly sporting its connectors on the back. And damn it all. it’s so simple it could work.
The rear port revolution has been spotted on the new TUF Gaming B760M-BTF WIFI D4 (opens in a new tab) by a leading tech Twitter account torn_us (opens in a new tab). It turns out that the BTF in the mobo’s name stands for “Back To (the) Future”, referring to this new backport design. We may see more of this style of motherboard in the future, which could be a huge win for PC builders.
That doesn’t mean there won’t be challenges, especially if it enters the mainstream. While hiding all those big power connectors, sata and basically everything else on the back sounds great, most cases just aren’t designed for that, because Intel PR Mark Walton (opens in a new tab) points out in his Tweet sharing a Club386 (opens in a new tab) item on the board. He also notes that a little DIY with a Dremel could be the solution to this problem.
A simpler answer is to simply get cases suitable for this new style of hidden port design, and we’d be surprised if Asus didn’t already have one in the works. A response to Walton’s Tweet shows quite a compelling image of a (opens in a new tab), but without any other verifiable information. In this one, you can see holes in the back panel allowing all those ports to pass through, and it feels like a dream to wire up compared to the usual front port setup.
Aside from the lack of cases to go with it, the Asus TUF Gaming B760M-BTF WIFI D4 seems like a pretty capable little micro-ATX board. This is an Intel socket supporting 12th and 13th generation processors with the B760 chipset like the Asus Rog Strix b760-F Gaming Wi-Fi Mobo (opens in a new tab). There’s PCIe 5.0 for the GPU, while everything else still seems to be PCIe 4.0 along with the use of DDR4 RAM and built-in WiFi 6.
As for ports, there are quite a few on the rear I/O. You have HDMI and DisplayPort (opens in a new tab) for your output choices, along with three audio jacks and a 2.5GB Ethernet. When it comes to USB Type-A connections, you get seven of the damn things. Four USB 2.0 and three USB 3.2 including a Gen 2 port. This is combined with three Type C, just to prove that it really took until 2023 for us to think about putting cables in the back of motherboards.