Every time I see the sizes of GPUs increase, I'm reminded of this from over 2 decades ago: https://vgamuseum.ru/wp-content/gallery/bitching-fast/bitchi...
"256 MB of curiously high bandwidth"
We Need New Motherboards Before GPUs Collapse Under Their Own Gravity
141–150 of 362 posts
Re: We Need New Motherboards Before GPUs Collapse Under Their Own Gravity
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have one of these for a much smaller card, mostly so that cold airflow from the floor intake fans actually has a path to get up to the RAM and VRMs. This is a workaround for a case that doesn't have front intake, which is preferable in my opinion. It does look a little cool, but I always worry a little about the reliability of the cable itself. Does it REALLY meet the signal integrity specifications for PCI-E? Prob…
LTT has a video where they tried to see how many PCIe riser cables they could string together before it stopped working.[1] They got to several meters. Maybe you could argue that it's worse inside a PC case since there's more EMI, but it seems like your PCIe riser cable would have to be very out of spec before you'd notice anything. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5xvwPa3r7M
It's not clear whether they reached a limit of drive strength or latency (I doubt EMI is the factor, since he said those are shielded) but that's a good demonstration of the resiliency of self-clocked differential serial (and aggregated serial) buses. The technology is much closer to networking standards like Ethernet than traditional parallel PCI, with features like built-in checksums, error correction (newer versions), and automatic retransmit.
Re: We Need New Motherboards Before GPUs Collapse Under Their Own Gravity
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
My proposal isn’t too different. Move the one ultra-fast PCIe slot to the top of the motherboard. It would be mounted so the GPU plugs in parallel to the motherboard, on the same plane, above the motherboard on a tower case. The few other PCIe slots that exist can stay at the bottom. Only downside is the case has to be taller. Not sure if that would be considered a problem or not. This doesn’t really help dual GPU se…
> Only downside is the case has to be taller Not necessarily. A flexible interconnect would allow the GPU to be planar with the MB; just bend it 180 degrees. Now your GPU and CPU can have coolers with good airflow instead of the farcical CPU (125mm+ tall heatsinks...) and GPU cooling designs (three fans blowing into the PCB and exhausting through little holes...) prevailing today. My idea is to separate the whole CPU…
I was kind of hoping doing it that way would let you put big CPU style coolers on the GPU parts with a lot more height than a 1x or 2x expansion slot.
If you “folded” the GPU over the CPU to save height I would think that would be worse than today for heat.
Maybe I’ve got this backwards. Give up on PCIe, or put it above the rest of the motherboard. The one GPU slot, planar to the motherboard, stays below. Basically my previous idea flipped vertically.
The other PCIe slots don’t need to run as fast and may be able to take the extra signal distance needed. The GPU could secure to the backplane (like my original idea) but would have tons of room for cooling like the CPU.
Re: We Need New Motherboards Before GPUs Collapse Under Their Own Gravity
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I have a motherboard with a bent out of shape port because of the weight of the card in it. My current desktop has a sag of easily half an inch at the end of the card and it’s not even a particularly large one by current standards. The ATX spec obviously wasn’t designed with GPUs this heavy and this power hungry.
historically cases had a bracket at the front to support full length cards. I even remember I once had a reference amd card that had an odd extension so that it would be supported by the forward full length brackets. I have to admit I have not seen that front bracket for a long time. some server chassis have a bar across the top to support large cards. this would bet great except gfx card manufacturers like to exceed…
I came here to mention the front support bracket. You'll find it on the larger AMD workstation cards more often than others, I first remember it on a FirePro reference card, and some searching turned up examples of it for the AMD FirePro V7900, and a few other models.
I've also had the vertical clearance issue since I try to rack mount all my gear now I've got a soundproof rack, its very annoying to need more than 4U of space just to fit a video card in a stable vertical orientation.
Re: We Need New Motherboards Before GPUs Collapse Under Their Own Gravity
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you link to the case you use?
This is the one I used on my last two builds, be aware it is a bit of a chonker. The main reason I choose it over the others is look at all them 5 1/4 bays, the whole front of it is 5 1/4 bays. 5 1/4 bays for days. do you know how many stupid drive bays, fan controllers, sd slots, switches etc you can fit in this case... By my count all of them. https://www.newegg.com/rosewill-rsv-l4500u-black/p/N82E16811... https://…
The one you linked looks like it only has three 5.25 bays at most?
Re: We Need New Motherboards Before GPUs Collapse Under Their Own Gravity
#146It's the IBM PC legacy. The won and we've lived with that form-factor now for 40 years. A new PC looks very much like that of 1982. Back in '82 when I started in robotics tech, we mostly used VME. A super-robust interconnect platform. There is no "motherboard" with VME and similar bus architectures. There is a backplane. Why can't we have the benefits of a physical platform like VME but with the electrical form-facto…
A backplane and a bunch of additional connectors add cost that the PC market doesn't want to pay.
checks features of motherboard ... additional connectors, yep... PCIe backplane, yep...
Having bought both... it is definitely costs they don't want to pay, but not the cost of those features. It's more like industrial grade PSUs and redundancy that get mandated by various specifications and end up reducing the market size which further racks up costs.
Re: We Need New Motherboards Before GPUs Collapse Under Their Own Gravity
#147It's the IBM PC legacy. The won and we've lived with that form-factor now for 40 years. A new PC looks very much like that of 1982. Back in '82 when I started in robotics tech, we mostly used VME. A super-robust interconnect platform. There is no "motherboard" with VME and similar bus architectures. There is a backplane. Why can't we have the benefits of a physical platform like VME but with the electrical form-facto…
An important reason why you cannot have that is that the VME is a shared bus, while PCIe is a very high-frequency LVDS point-to-point system that you absolutely cannot implement on a shared bus.
Like I said - not the electric part but the mechanical part.
Re: We Need New Motherboards Before GPUs Collapse Under Their Own Gravity
#148How about we move to external only GPUs with huge connectors? If GPUs are half the size, power consumption and price of a PC now, they might as well be a separate device. As a bonus the rest of the motherboard & PCs actually get much smaller. A PC without any spinning disks could conceivably just be the size of a NUC by default, something you can travel with when you don't need the beefy GPU.
The most expensive part of GPU operation (power-wise) isn't computation, it's actually moving information around. Moving the GPU further away from the CPU and storage is going to lead to worse latency and power requirements. Over the next 10-15 years, we'll probably see CPU+GPU packages become mainstream instead of CPU (with basic integrated graphics) and a separate GPU.
The most expensive part of GPU operation (power-wise) isn't computation, it's actually moving information around
I doubt that. Compare the GPU temperature (a good proxy for power consumption) when playing a game or doing GPGPU stuff vs playing a video (without GPU acceleration, so it's just acting as a framebuffer). The former involves far more computation, and gets the GPU much hotter.
Re: We Need New Motherboards Before GPUs Collapse Under Their Own Gravity
#149No, we don't. Show me the articles where peoples' PCIe slots are ripping out.
What we could do is have AIO cooling like CPUs, more affordable than the current solutions or the "water block" designs from the brands.
Or, have more sandwich designs like Sliger which have a mini itx and a PCIe card parallel and connected via a ribbon. I don't think there is any claimed performance loss due to the cable.
Re: We Need New Motherboards Before GPUs Collapse Under Their Own Gravity
#150We need more cases for horizontally oriented motherboards.
I was also thinking of a case where it can handle the cooling of a deshrouded GPU. Perhaps we should delegate the cooling options to the user without having to void warranty.