Stop making cards wider; Bring back full-length cards! With cases having guided slots for them!
The width of the card is entirely for the heatsink and fanks, not for more electronics.
We Need New Motherboards Before GPUs Collapse Under Their Own Gravity
71–80 of 362 posts
Re: We Need New Motherboards Before GPUs Collapse Under Their Own Gravity
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
> PCIe extenders need to become a thing again PCIe extenders are a thing already. Current PC case fashion trends have already influenced the inclusion of extenders and a place to vertically mount the GPU to the case off the motherboard. GPU sag is also a bit of a silly problem for the motherboard to handle when $10 universal GPU support brackets already exist.
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.
Re: We Need New Motherboards Before GPUs Collapse Under Their Own Gravity
#73Could we just follow the atx spec? There is a maximum length for expansion cards, and at that end there are optional supports. These are in servers already. Just start using all that case volume to support the GPU.
I was always under the impression that was to help stabilize long cards so they don’t sag or fall during transport.
But these aren’t just long cards. They have huge heavy chunks of metal and fans on them in the name of cooling.
Are those brackets strong enough for the job? I remember them being basically shallow plastic slots.
Re: We Need New Motherboards Before GPUs Collapse Under Their Own Gravity
#74With a power consumption of that magnitude, no wonder power grids are buckling everywhere. People's hunger for power is seemingly insatiable.
Power grids are not buckling everywhere. Also this card uses less than a third of a single space heater. Finally, this card has not been released yet, so it isn't causing anything.
Re: We Need New Motherboards Before GPUs Collapse Under Their Own Gravity
#75Could we just follow the atx spec? There is a maximum length for expansion cards, and at that end there are optional supports. These are in servers already. Just start using all that case volume to support the GPU.
My case has these and I would love to know the proper keywords to find extension brackets I could add to my shorter cards. Searching for "extender" returns electrical extenders for the PCIe port itself.
Re: We Need New Motherboards Before GPUs Collapse Under Their Own Gravity
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is what I started doing. I build my desktop pc's in 4u server chassis[1] I had it vertical in a tower config until a couple months ago when I thought about the dynamics of the situation a bit and moved it to the flat orientation, as you would find it in an actual rack. 1. the cases(even the cheap ones) are better built and have better airflow than most tower cases, as a bonus, no rgb or windows.
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...
Re: We Need New Motherboards Before GPUs Collapse Under Their Own Gravity
#77How 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 problem with external gpus is that the pcie5x16 slot requires signal integrity chips every 5 inches or so [1]. Even for pcie4 it's bad, many people had blue screens or boot issues when using pcie3 only rated riser cables with a pcie4 video card, even though electrically they have the same connections. So, having a huge cable with x16 lanes of pcie5 on the back of the computer doesn't seem that feasible. Maybe fiber optics could be a thing.
[1] https://www.planetanalog.com/signal-integrity-challenges-set...
Re: We Need New Motherboards Before GPUs Collapse Under Their Own Gravity
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here is an LTT video about how many PCI-E extensions one can daisychain without problems. The limit is around 3 meters. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5xvwPa3r7M
One should note that it will works way worse with higher pcie versions of today
Are you referring to pcie 4?
Re: We Need New Motherboards Before GPUs Collapse Under Their Own Gravity
#79My motherboard says it has "reinforced" pcie slot :) But yea, I have to say peak power consumption has to be regulated so companies compete in efficiency, not raw power.
There sorta is a cap in place given that most residential circuits in the US are 15 or 20 amps. We're already not far off of that being a serious concern even on non-crazy builds. Edit: ok maybe crazy builds but still it's not that far fetched on current trajectories.
I don't know if I'd call 1800W (residential circuit limit) builds "non-crazy". Even half that power is rare to see since that's pretty much two top of the line consumer graphics cards paired to a top of the line enterprise CPU.
Re: We Need New Motherboards Before GPUs Collapse Under Their Own Gravity
#80I always thought it interesting how most tech companies prioritize shrinking the hardware but GPU's seem to be an exception.
The technology is getting smaller! It's just that at the same time, people still demand orders of magnitude higher performance. There are physical limits to how small a cooler can be, and that takes up like 95% of the space.