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 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.