Tbh, the whole card format feels very legacy, even for my Vega 56 “dual slot” card, and that thing “only” consumes ~230W.
If ppl back then could’ve foreseen what obscenely power hungry parts would be shoehorned into the expansion card format, they probably would’ve chosen a different approach for GPUs specifically.
Modularity is nice — both for personal preference reasons and incentivizing-market-competition reasons — but it does come at a cost.
The thing is: even in our modular world right now, you don’t really have many choices. Two CPU companies, three GPU companies (two of them being the same as the CPU companies)…
We could someday have a world where PC hardware is technically less modular than it is today but consumers have more choices in the marketplace than they do today.
Kinda hard to do when so many GPU vendors slap their memory and power circuits all over the place. Even if the die is in the same place cooler manufacturers would need to test fit a bajillion models, and on top of that they’d need insane R&D budgets to keep up with new additions, sometimes coming years after the original gpu comes out
My concerns were more about the airflow path and less about actually interchangeable coolers, although those are a thing.
Like it just feels wrong to blast the air into a solid PCB… That’s kind of solved with flow through designs, but a tower style cooler would probably be less noisy.
I was joking about it being 2.5 slots, tbf most modern cards should be triple slots. Mine is 300W and it’s pretty chunky to stay below 60C, best option for big cards is a horizontal mobo imo
edit: unpopular opinion but I’d rather have a chunky card that stays cool as fuck than a slim one, that’s why I picked up the Nitro when I had a 6650XT
Tbh, the whole card format feels very legacy, even for my Vega 56 “dual slot” card, and that thing “only” consumes ~230W.
If ppl back then could’ve foreseen what obscenely power hungry parts would be shoehorned into the expansion card format, they probably would’ve chosen a different approach for GPUs specifically.
iGPUs should have been a better option, but they were hamstrung by PCI conventions and graphics APIs favoring discrete VRAM.
(Just look at how x86 SoC consoles run circles around similar-spec PCs.)
I’m hoping that ARM is a chance to reset.
I do like the modularity of discrete GPUs though.
But a cooling setup similar to CPUs would’ve been better for airflow.
Modularity is nice — both for personal preference reasons and incentivizing-market-competition reasons — but it does come at a cost.
The thing is: even in our modular world right now, you don’t really have many choices. Two CPU companies, three GPU companies (two of them being the same as the CPU companies)…
We could someday have a world where PC hardware is technically less modular than it is today but consumers have more choices in the marketplace than they do today.
Kinda hard to do when so many GPU vendors slap their memory and power circuits all over the place. Even if the die is in the same place cooler manufacturers would need to test fit a bajillion models, and on top of that they’d need insane R&D budgets to keep up with new additions, sometimes coming years after the original gpu comes out
My concerns were more about the airflow path and less about actually interchangeable coolers, although those are a thing.
Like it just feels wrong to blast the air into a solid PCB… That’s kind of solved with flow through designs, but a tower style cooler would probably be less noisy.
I’ve been expecting socketed GPUs ever since the AMD/ATI merger.
There were many a meme of gas powered GPU’s back in the day. We knew.
I was joking about it being 2.5 slots, tbf most modern cards should be triple slots. Mine is 300W and it’s pretty chunky to stay below 60C, best option for big cards is a horizontal mobo imo
edit: unpopular opinion but I’d rather have a chunky card that stays cool as fuck than a slim one, that’s why I picked up the Nitro when I had a 6650XT