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We Need New Motherboards Before GPUs Collapse Under Their Own Gravity
- bigmattystyles 4y agoCan you have a cable extended pcie socket or would that introduce too much latency? You could argue we just need a new form factor. And if I can put the mobo parallel to the GPUs, problem kinda solved. Or just go back to the desktop form factor like someone else said, remove torque from the socket.
- flenserboy 4y agoPerhaps game makers could focus on gameplay and story instead of whatever unnecessary detail is chewing through so much data. The big iron is great for actual work, but is pure overkill to have in some junior high kid's room. Just an idea.
- bitxbitxbitcoin 4y agoTurn the tower on its side so the motherboard is parallel with the ground and the weight of the GPU keeps it in the PCI-e slot. It is my understanding that GPUs are able to still properly dissipate their heat in this configuration. Great article!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- AmVess 4y agoI have a horizontal PC chassis. Easy access to everything and has two large 140MM fans in front. It runs cool and nearly silent. I am never going back to a tower for my main PC again.
- lvturner 4y agoCame here to somewhat sarcastically write this, glad to see it here. Less sarcastically, I would quite like to go back to putting my monitor on top of a desktop - sure beats a stack of books.
- eigenspace 4y agoI do this with my PC unironically.
- toast0 4y agoWatch out or you'll invent desktop cases and we'll put the monitor on top. ;)
- 0x457 4y agoVertical-mount GPU gang sees no issues.
- moandcompany 4y agoIn the old days, desktop cases existed where you could use the case as a vertical tower or horizontally to put the monitor on top. People could also move to a rack mountable chassis.
- somat 4y agoThat 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.
- puffoflogic 4y agoCan you link to the case you use?
- somat 4y agoThis 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/N82E16811147328 https://www.newegg.com/rosewill-rsv-l4500u-black/p/N82E16811... https://www.newegg.com/Controller-Panels/SubCategory/ID-11 https://www.newegg.com/Controller-Panels/SubCategory/ID-11
- Dylan16807 4y agoThe one you linked looks like it only has three 5.25 bays at most?
- somat 4y agonot sure, perhaps(cookies?) you are seeing a different chassis type, the one I ment to link to is "4U, 15 Bays & 8 Fans" it comes with three 3u(5.25) internal drive bays(5 drives each). honestly they suck, pull them to get access to the 5.15 bays.
- teddyh 4y agoStop making cards wider; Bring back full-length cards! With cases having guided slots for them!
- db48x 4y agoThe width of the card is entirely for the heatsink and fanks, not for more electronics.
- termie 4y agoCompare the size of the new air-cooled 40XX cards and the iChill 4090, which is tiny by comparison. The simple answer is just to use liquid cooling if you have a card using 400w. Then all the absurdity just goes away.
- RL_Quine 4y agoThe water cooling on my 3090 is heavier than the air cooling for the same card, as you need a coldplate on both sides of the thing to get rid of the heat.
- 15155 4y agoIf you give me a lever long enough and a place to stand, I will move the world. The length of the 3090 with air cooling is what makes it so heavy on the PCIE connector - localized coldplate weight is not an issue.
- RL_Quine 4y agoThe water block is full coverage, the length of the card on both sides, and is a gigantic block of copper. With the water inside it’s even heavier.
- 15155 4y agoFor the 3090 FE, at least, the card is half the length of the air cooler and an EKWB 3090 FE waterblock is the same length as the board.
- m463 4y ago> Then all the absurdity just goes away. and once you have liquid cooling, maybe you can go to 800w...
- winkeltripel 4y agoCould 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.
- somat 4y agoCheers, bravo, exactly what I wanted to say. However just to be pedantic, I just read the atx spec to find this exact information and it is not there. I suspect the expansion card dimensions are in the pci spec.
- MBCook 4y agoI 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.
- Lammy 4y agoMy 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.
- stjohnswarts 4y agothere are $10 brackets that solve all this for most people, not sure why there is an HN panic to suddenly rearchitect the whole PC gaming platform.
- Nition 4y agoIs that the same as the one shown in the article's spec diagram, or something different again?
- andrewmcwatters 4y agoProblem is that the card retainers in the spec would all, I suppose, need to align with the chassis. Card widths are highly variable, so all manufacturers would need to change their card designs to allow for at least providing aftermarket retainers on them.
- sp332 4y agoI suppose it's possible, but I have yet to see an actual GPU that couldn't be fixed by properly supporting the back bracket, as shown in this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liChy76nQJ4&t=591 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liChy76nQJ4&t=591 (Starts around 10:00 in)
- rawoke083600 4y agoLol it's a matter of time, until you buy a GPU and "just" add a CPU and some RAM.
- rybosworld 4y agoI always thought it interesting how most tech companies prioritize shrinking the hardware but GPU's seem to be an exception.
- fjfbsufhdvfy 4y agoThe 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.
- e1ghtSpace 4y agoNobody wants a small gpu.
- doubled112 4y agoHow small are we talking? I really like the Mini ITX form factor and have multiple PCs that fit on IKEA shelves. I prefer shorter/smaller GPUs. Better airflow. Easier at build time too. My EVGA RTX 3050 is about the right balance.
- hn_zorba 4y agoFrom now on, we mount the motherboard on the GPU.
- cabirum 4y agoMy 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.
- db48x 4y agoI don't really agree that max power should be regulated, but power efficiency should be featured much more prominently in reviews, as should TCO.
- gh02t 4y agoThere 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.
- jsjohnst 4y ago> We're already not far off of that being a serious concern even on non-crazy builds. Show me an example of a “non-crazy” build that’s over 1,200W, let alone over 1,500W. I’m genuinely curious.
- gh02t 4y agoI said near, we still have some breathing room. But as noted elsewhere, 15 A is a max for short periods, the practical limit for continuous use is more like 1200-1400 W which definitely seems like it might be plausible soon. Plus other things on the circuit. Fancy ultra bright HDR monitors use a decent chunk of power, and anything else.
- jsjohnst 4y ago> But as noted elsewhere, 15 A is a max for short periods, the practical limit for continuous use is more like 1200-1400 W which definitely seems like it might be plausible soon. Per NEC in the US, the wire used in a circuit has to be rated to handle a current draw of up to 80% continuously at the specified temperature max for the type of installation. 80% of 15 is 12, the average home in the US has split phase incoming power with a nominal voltage of 120V (1440W) with many as high as 125V (1500W). Note that is current draw over long periods of time, which a gaming rig under heavy gaming won’t usually do. Maybe a mining rig back in the day would, but otherwise it’s just not true you’re continuously drawing anywhere near 1,000+ watts on anything but the most crazy setups. > I said near, we still have some breathing room. No, you made a wild ass conjecture not based in fact and when gently questioned on it, you shifted goal posts and made up more conjecture.
- db48x 4y agoAt this point both the motherboard and graphics card need to be mounted on the back plate of the chassis, so that they can both use tower coolers. You can already use a PCIe extender to achieve this, but it should become the standard.
- dragontamer 4y ago1. While I agree we're beginning to reach absurd proportions, lets really analyze the situation and think about it. 2. Are there any GPUs that actually have performed physical damage on a motherboard slot? 3. GPUs are already 2-wide by default, and some are 3-wide. 4-wide GPUs will have more support from the chassis. This seems like the simpler solution, especially since most people rarely have a 2nd add in card at all in their computers these days. 4. Perhaps the real issue is that PCIe extenders need to become a thing again, and GPUs can be placed in an anchored point elsewhere on the chassis. However, extending up to 4-wide GPUs seems more likely (because PCIe needs to get faster-and-faster. GPU-to-CPU communications is growing more and more important, so the PCIe 5 and PCIe 6 lanes are going to be harder and harder to extend out). For now, its probably just an absurd look, but I'm not 100% convinced we have a real problem yet. For years, GPUs have drawn more power than the CPU/Motherboard combined, because GPUs perform most of the work in video games (ie: Matrix multiplication to move the list of vertices to the right location, and pixel-shaders to calculate the angle of light/shadows).
- superchroma 4y agoRE 2: We were shipping a system with a 980ti and it ripped the PCIE slot off the board despite being propped with foam.
- teaearlgraycold 4y agoHard foam? Regardless I'd recommend against shipping with a CPU cooler or GPU installed but some SIs seem to get away with it with self-fitting hard foam packs.
- ikiris 4y ago... maybe don't ship a built system then? Those boxes get dropped
- superchroma 4y agoWe didn't have a choice. We were building to a strong spec and sending a unit to trade shows.
- superchroma 4y agoIt's not a motherboard problem. How would you integrate support for user provisioned cooling options (to match cooler to the card wattage) and still keep any sort of flexible expansion slot area? GPUs can't be turned into a single chip, there's too much going on, so you're never going to have a CPU cooler situation. So, fine, what if you made them daughterboards mounted like M2 SSD's; that may work, except ATX now has to become ITX to give room for an extra board's worth of space. It's a PC case orthodoxy issue, really. People want plugs at the back of the box, which dictates how the GPU must sit in the case, and disagreement on GPU sizing means no brackets. Solve these two issues and life gets a lot better. Or, solve it like SFF case guys solved this problem, by using a PCIE extender cable to allow the GPU to be mounted wherever you like.
- rascul 4y agoWhy can't I find a recent GPU that doesn't take up half my case? Do the GPU manufacturers not care about people who want more than onboard graphics but don't need the most powerful gaming GPU?
- dragontamer 4y agoWhat's wrong with the NVidia 1630 or 1660, or AMD 6400, or Intel Arc 380?
- rascul 4y agoDual slot, massive fans, and only the Arc isn't extra long, from the pictures I see. I guess we have different ideas of big. Edit: Perhaps I use the term incorrectly, I mean they take up two case slots even if only a single pcie slot.
- dragontamer 4y agohttps://www.newegg.com/sapphire-radeon-rx-6400-11315-01-20g/p/N82E16814202416 https://www.newegg.com/sapphire-radeon-rx-6400-11315-01-20g/... Single slot, half-profile, small fan, shorter than ATX / mATX? This is a mini-card that'd fit in an ITX case (170mm)...
- kenhwang 4y agoYou can? Both the RTX 3050 and RX 6400 come in single fan form factors not much longer than a PCIE slot. Anything weaker than that is getting beaten by AGUs.
- rascul 4y agoFor reference, there used to be low profile cards available barely longer than an AGP slot. For example, here's a low profile Nvidia Gefore4 MX440 (I used to have one of these): https://c1.neweggimages.com/NeweggImage/ProductImage/14-135-135-09.jpg https://c1.neweggimages.com/NeweggImage/ProductImage/14-135-... > Anything weaker than that is getting beaten by AGUs. Is AGU the GPU on the CPU thing? Is it not possible (or maybe not profitable) to put something a little more performant than an AGU but doesn't need such a massive fan on a full size multiple slot card?
- SanjayMehta 4y agoNew design: Switch things around and stick the CPU into a slot on the GPU.
- probably_a_gpt 4y agoGive it a few years
- carabiner 4y agoThe GPU should be the motherboard, and everything sticks onto it.
- ungamedplayer 4y agoThis is gpu manufacturing "wet dream" endgame
- DaiPlusPlus 4y agoSo how would multi-GPU setups work?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- midoridensha 4y agoYou buy a motherboard with the number of GPUs you want on it. Or maybe they could devise some sort of stacking system, with each GPU board separate and stacked.
- DaiPlusPlus 4y ago> Or maybe they could devise some sort of stacking system, with each GPU board separate and stacked. Yeah, I remember those stackable/modular computer concepts that industrial-design students loved to put in their portfolios from the late-1980s to the mid-1990s; I get the concept: component/modular PCs are kinda like the modular hi-fi systems of the 1980s, except those design students consistently failed to consider how coordinated aesthetics are the first thing to go out the window when the biz-dev people need the hardware folks to save costs or integrate with a third-party, etc. ...it feels like a rare miracle that at least we have 19-inch racks to fall-back on, but those are hardly beautiful (except the datacenter cable-porn, of course): https://www.reddit.com/r/RetroFuturism/comments/gioqrp/soviet_modular_computer_system_1986/ https://www.reddit.com/r/RetroFuturism/comments/gioqrp/sovie... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphinx_%28home_automation_system%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphinx_%28home_automation_syst...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ruffrey 4y ago[deleted]
- anigbrowl 4y agoExplicit instructions considered harmful
- ThrowawayTestr 4y agoAre the screws into the case not enough?
- msbarnett 4y ago> A 4080 series card will demand a whopping 450 W, No, that was just a rumour that was floating around. The 4080 16GB model is 340W TGP, the 12 GB is 285W TGP out of the box. The 3080 (10 GB) was 320W TGP, as a comparison point.
- Scene_Cast2 4y agoPerhaps a typo? The 4090 official TDP is 450W.
- msbarnett 4y agoCould be. But the pre-launch rumours also claimed the 4080 was a 450 W product, and the 4090 is so niche (basically it’s the old Titan line) that it’s not worth handwringing about because it’s not targeted at normal consumers (for “I’d buy a > $1000 GPU for gaming” values of “normal”).
- willis936 4y agoNvidia is attempting to increase sales on the high-end by positioning the 4080 and 4070 (aka 4080 12 GB) at a much higher price point than the market demands while giving good value to the 4090 (60% more performance than the 3090 Ti which launched at $2000).
- zaptheimpaler 4y agoHow 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.
- jvanderbot 4y agoYou can easily buy a NUC ECE (size of a graphics card) and use a pcie cable to connect to an actual card. This is my plan for my next machine.
- imtringued 4y agoOk so just plug your computer into the GPU ;)
- pdimitar 4y agoHow would that work? I admit I never even thought of PCIe cables, thought it was always just a physical slot you have to put stuff in.
- nighthawk454 4y agothere are PCIe riser cables that you can imagine as an extension cord for a PCIe slot. they're popular in some thin server chassis or in miniITX builds where the form factor dictates the GPU must be in a certain orientation to fit. there's also the method of external GPUs via Thunderbolt (which carries PCIe) that is more practical for putting a GPU in an entirely separate enclosure
- pubby 4y agoI wonder how far that connection could be before it stops working. Probably not much!
- 4y ago
- voidfunc 4y agoI predict the GPU will need to be externalized in the future with its own cooling and power system. You'll plug into the motherboard via some cable interconnect. They're simply getting too big, power hungry and hot to keep in colocated in the case.
- Victerius 4y agoWith a power consumption of that magnitude, no wonder power grids are buckling everywhere. People's hunger for power is seemingly insatiable.
- CyberDildonics 4y agoPower 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.
- db48x 4y agoAccording to the Steam Hardware Survey (which you can view for yourself at <https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...>), the RTX 3090 makes up less than 0.48% of all video cards in use by gamers. The 450W power figure is for the new RTX 4090, which will no doubt take a while to reach even that level. It might be nice to have more information than that, but it honestly doesn’t seem like a huge problem. Your fridge probably costs you more over a year than even a 4090. See also air conditioning.
- Sohcahtoa82 4y agoThe power grid is only crumbling in places where political corruption is blocking fixing the grid. See Texas.
- acapybara 4y agoThe HGX A100 solves this problem: https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/introducing-hgx-a100-most-powerful-accelerated-server-platform-for-ai-hpc/ https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/introducing-hgx-a100-most-... Basically we need to move away from slots!
- lightedman 4y agoI'd rather have a dedicated socket on the motherboard where I can just slap in a GPU chip and use whatever RAM I have soldered onto the mobo around the GPU socket.
- rektide 4y agoI wonder whether pcie cabling (like oculink) will scale/work with newer pcie specs. I have long thought the bitcoin miners were onto something, with pcie risers galore. In my head I know pcb is cheap and connectors - cables arent but it always seemed so tempting anyways; very small boards, cpu & memory (or onchip memory) & vrm, and then just pipes to peripherals & network (and with specs like CXL 3.0, we kind of could be getting both at once).
- frostburg 4y agoThis specific problem can be solved by rotating motherboard 90 degrees (there are a few Silverstone cases that are laid out like this, they also tend to have excellent air cooling performance).
- jrootabega 4y agoYeah, I've had a Silverstone Raven for 10+ years, so I'm not sure why those types of cases haven't become the standard. They have their flaws, like it being awkward to route your cables into the top area, and needing good airspace underneath the case. But it's balanced out by being able to easily plug stuff into the top when you don't care about pretty cable routing, a focus on powerful, adjustable airflow, and less need for space on the sides. I'm guessing vertical space is the main problem for people.
- anigbrowl 4y agoWhat if we just have blocks of quartz and use laser arrays to build photonic switching junctions, no more cooling problems because it's just photons ¯\(°_o)/¯ Seriously though, I imagine it's only a matter of time before these engineering decisions are themselves handed off to machines.
- chx 4y agoThere used to be so called PIO motherboards from China. These were slightly larger than ITX and the PCIe connector was 90 degrees rotated so the video card was planar with the motherboard. https://imgur.com/a/ve1T0dE https://imgur.com/a/ve1T0dE And if we are to reform our computer chassis anyways, we could move the PSU to straddle the motherboard and the video card and even have the VRM inside. High amperage "comb" connectors exist and VRM daughtercard motherboards existed https://c1.neweggimages.com/NeweggImage/productimage/13-131-932-02.jpg https://c1.neweggimages.com/NeweggImage/productimage/13-131-... Change the form factor so two 120mm fans fit, one in front, one in the back. So you would have three 120mm front-to-back tunnels: one for the video card, one for the PSU, one for the CPU.
- MuffinFlavored 4y agoVRM?
- lightedman 4y agoVoltage Regulator Module.
- Lramseyer 4y ago> Should we have GPU VRAM slots alongside CPU RAM slots? Is that even possible? I chuckled a little at this because I used to wonder the same thing until I had to actually bring up a GDDR6 interface. Basically the reason GDDR6 is able to run so much faster is because we assume that everything is soldered down, and not socketed/slotted. Back when I worked for a GPU company, I occasionally had conversations with co-workers about how ridiculous it was that we put a giant heavy heatsink CPU, and a low profile cooler on the GPU, which in today's day and age produces way more heat! I'm of the opinion that we make mini ATX shaped graphics cards so that you bolt them behind your motherboard (though you would need a different case that had standoffs in both directions.)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- hinkley 4y agoWhat if GPU makers made motherboards?
- sgtnoodle 4y agoI vaguely recall Nvidia motherboards were junk in the late 2000's.
- 7speter 4y agoThey made motherboard chipsets (nforce, iirc?), not motherboards, unless I missed something. I think by the late 2000’s, though, their discreet gpus on laptops were problematic because they got so hot they detached from the motherboards or fried themselves. In a lot of cases, these systems shipped with these gpus and intel processors with integrated igpus. This happened to a thinkpad t400 I had a while ago, the nvidia graphics stopped working and I had to disable it/enable the intel gpu in the bios (maybe even blind). Iirc this snafu was what soured relations between apple and nvidia.
- mschuster91 4y ago
- zargon 4y ago1. I don't see the problem with GPU support sticks. I used one at least 12 years ago. 2. The real problem, in my opinion, is out of control power consumption. Get these cards back down to 200 W. That's already twice the power delivery of a mainstream CPU socket.
- m463 4y ago> The real problem, in my opinion, is out of control power consumption That is the design spec for laptops, but not many people game on laptops because although they are more efficient, people would rather go 2x or faster and use more power
- lstodd 4y agoAll you have to do is put an aluminum I-bar on top of the card if the cooler itself doesn't provide adequate rigidity, which I doubt. I'd guess if excessive stress on the PCIe slot was a problem, it'd be solved by combining a good 2-3 slot mount on the back side and enough aluminium+plastic to hold the rest.
- jwlake 4y agoWhy doesn't the "video card" just come with a processor socket?
- intrasight 4y agoIt'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-factor of PCIe?
- dragontamer 4y agoI had a professor talk about those old systems once. Weren't those systems a bus architecture? Like the backplane wires all shared the same wires so it was possible to keep stringing them along? Modern PCIe, and even USB3, are star networks. Everything directly connects to the northbridge like an Ethernet cable star network connects to a switch. ------- PCIe slots communicate the idea well. There are only so many dedicated wires the northbridge exposes to USB3 or PCIe. This, it makes sense to have those limited wires in the form of PCIe slots or USB3 connectors.
- Tuna-Fish 4y agoAn 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.
- willis936 4y agoThere are fabric backplane solutions such as fibre channel and microtca (leverages pcie or ethernet). There's no reason you can't get benefits from a fabric over point-to-point today, it's just big and expensive.
- intrasight 4y agoLike I said - not the electric part but the mechanical part.
- rocket_surgeron 4y agoVPX (VITA 46). Think of it like VMEexpress. I use PCIe over VPX every day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VPX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VPX Please, lord, somebody else outside of aerospace use it so more vendors get involved and availability and basically everything about the entire supply chain gets better through competition.
- hakfoo 4y agoThis is (much less of a) problem on a flat layout, like what used to be called a "desktop" case, instead of the conventional tower. Then the weight of the card is just pushing straight down in the direction the card already wants to be oriented. I'm using a pretty heavy modern GPU (ASRock OC Formula 6900XT) in a Cooler Master HAF XB with that layout, and sagging and torquing is not much of a concern. The worst part is just fitting it in, since there's like 2mm between the front plate and the board-- you have to remove the fans so you can angle the card enough to fit. I also suspect that if we went to the 80's style "a full length card is XXX millimetres long, and we'll provide little rails at the far end of the case to capture the far end of a card that length" design, it would help too, but that would be hard to ensure with today's exotic heatsink designs and power plug clearances.
- MrFoof 4y agoI made this GIF to illustrate the point of how large these new high-end NVIDIA Lovelace consumer GPUs are: https://i.imgur.com/327INxU.gif https://i.imgur.com/327INxU.gif This is the ASUS RTX 4090 ROG STRIX. Air cooled, no waterblock. That is a mini-ITX form factor motherboard, hence why it looks so comically large by comparison. This is one of the physically smallest 4090s launching. Its confirmed weight is 2325g, or 5 ⅛ lbs. Just the card, not the card in its packaging.
- userbinator 4y agoEvery 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/bitchin.jpg https://vgamuseum.ru/wp-content/gallery/bitching-fast/bitchi...
- tjr225 4y agoThis was a fun Time of humor: https://youtu.be/ZAtzN_ScKXY https://youtu.be/ZAtzN_ScKXY
- drewm1980 4y ago415 Bungholiomarks ought to be good enough for anyone.
- krasin 4y agoHere is a video review of the BitchingFast 3D 2000: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmCEXbspWuI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmCEXbspWuI
- sqrt_1 4y agoThe same Youtuber did a 4090 "review" for April fool day https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0frNP0qzxQc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0frNP0qzxQc
- l-lousy 4y agoThe fact that even the “not to be sold in china” bit is so on point even today is kind of scary
- hutzlibu 4y agoOr it is relaxing to be reminded, that all those geopolitical tensions and struggles are basically nothing new, so should not be taken too seriously.
- bl0b 4y ago"256 MB of curiously high bandwidth"
- unethical_ban 4y agoNo, 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.
- arvinsim 4y agoWe 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.
- wengo314 4y agowhy not simply use a case where the board is placed horizontally, that should not damage the slots? or provide a dedicated gpu slot with a riser-like mount that allows for gpu to be mounted separately from the actual board ( something what laptop owners do with external gpus) ? this way gpu could be any size and might have cooling on either side - or an external solution.
- prvc 4y agoNow that 5.25", 3.5", and 2.5" drives are less common in PCs, it might be time to think of a new standard which puts the GPU in a new form factor which allows for better (or at least simpler) airflow through the case. Seems needless to blow hot air into and out of the GPU just because of where it is situated inside. Imagine only a small number of fans pushing air in a single direction in order to efficiently cool all the components in the system.
- seiferteric 4y agoPut an edge mount PCIE connector on the motherboard and allow the graphics card to plug in parallel to the mother board and mount the card on the case itself like the motherboard.
- de6u99er 4y agoI don't agree. I think we need new GPU's with wider instruction sets. Or maybe FPGA's onboard for custom per use case. I hope that's why AMD merg d with Xilinx.
- yarg 4y agoWater cooling (with standardised connectors) seems like a sensible option (the heat-sink's the problem, not the GPU).
- newZWhoDis 4y agoThis. Why eject heat into your case?
- Taniwha 4y agoThis is not a new problem, back in the late 80s I worked for a Mac graphics card developer ... We made some of the first 24bit accelerated graphics cards. Our first was just an existing card with a small daughter card with pals an sram on it, it was so easy that we got our own logos put on many of the chips to put the competition off the scent, we designed that one in days and got it to market in weeks. We immediately started on 2 more designs. The next was all FPGA, it was as big a nubus card as one could build, it pulled too much power, and tilted under it's own weight out of the bus socket (Mac's didn't use screws to hold cards in place, that happened when you closed the chassis). We got it out the door about the point that the competition beat the first board's performance. The final card was built with custom silicon, designed backwards from "how fast can we possibly make the vrams go if we use all the tricks?", In this case we essentially bet the company on whether a new ~200 pin plastic packaging technology was viable. This design really soaked the competition. In those days big monitors didn't work on just any card so if you owned the high end graphics card biz you owned the high end monitor biz too ... The 3 card play above was worth more than $120m
- smilespray 4y agoI may well have used those cards for work! Radius, RasterOps or SuperMac?
- Taniwha 4y agoSuperMac - the first one was the "SuperMac Spectrum/24 series III", I can't remember the name of the big FPGA thing I built the accelerator on the last project (that 200 pin chip - look for a chip SQD-01 aka 'SQuiD') that was the basis of a whole family of subsequent cards (starting with the Thunder cards)
- smilespray 4y agoI loved those cards. My daily driver was a fully stacked IIfx with a SuperMac card. I remember telling my friends my display was more than a thousand pixels (1152 or something) wide.
- stormbrew 4y agoThe thing I don't get is why are we so damn stuck on towers as the default form factor? It's pretty much masochism to mount a sensitive piece of 8 billon layer circuit board vertically and then hang a bunch of blocks of solid heat conducting metal to it from the side, held on only by a soldered on piece of plastic. Bring back proper desktop cases!
- ironmagma 4y agoRight? Floor space is at an all-time premium with high housing costs. And most people I know have a stack of books/etc. to rise the monitor anyway.
- tpmx 4y agoHaving a ~140 mm tall desktop case under the monitor doesn't work that well with today's pretty large monitors - it would result in uncomfortable viewing angles. Add to that the often very wide monitor stands. And increased cooling noise because the case comes closer to your ears.
- mtsr 4y agoCurrent monitors can be raised on their stand, maybe future monitors could be lowered in front of whatever they’re on top of?
- Nevermark 4y agoMy 98 inch “monitor” is mounted on the wall Great for demoing things, or looking at while I walk in think circles. Keeps my desk clear, and I don’t need reading glasses to see it And yes, the bottom is mounted well below my desk’s surface height
- naasking 4y agoMount the computer on the back of the screen.
- htrp 4y agoLets just attach the rest of the components to the GPU and screw the gpu directly into the case.....
- ascar 4y agoI'm surprised this isn't mentioned here more clearly: Some high end cases like the be quiet silent base I'm using have the option to mount the graphics card vertically, basically parallel to the mainboard, in a separate anchor slot. It needs an additional connector cable (~$20), but other than that is easy to setup, looks better with a look-in case (the illuminated fans face the glass side) and the weight pulls on a special anchor point just for that with no electronics involved. Plus the card itself is more sturdy in that orientation and there is no issues with bending through its own weight. It might even be beneficial ventilation-wise as the graphics card no longer causes a horizontal divide (basically creating separate ventilation-zones on the top and bottom of the card). Yes, the cable will add approximately ~0.3ns of additional latency due to the added 10cm of distance. This is how it looks like: https://www.hardware-journal.de/images/Bilder/2018/test/be-quiet-silent-base-601/be-quiet-silent-base-601-08.jpg https://www.hardware-journal.de/images/Bilder/2018/test/be-q... https://www.hardware-journal.de/images/Bilder/2018/test/be-quiet-silent-base-601/be-quiet-silent-base-601-07.jpg https://www.hardware-journal.de/images/Bilder/2018/test/be-q...
- dQw4w9WgXcQ 4y agoHow does latency impact rendering etc?
- danielheath 4y agoPCI latency has no impact on rendering, but your card/motherboard may fallback to PCIE3 instead of using PCIE4, in which case filling the cards entire VRAM from RAM could take an extra half-second (slowing the loading of new textures an infinitesimal amount).
- mtsr 4y agoModern engines also do a lot of streaming data to VRAM, rather than loading everything up front. So it’s not necessarily a single delay and could very well impact framerates etc.
- 4y ago
- chubs 4y agoWhat if a 4-slot-wide GPU had 3 'dummy' slots that plug into the other unused PCI slots, no electrical connection, and only acted as support?
- fredoralive 4y agoModern motherboards often don't have PCIe slots next to the x16 "GPU" slots, as they'd nearly always be under the cooler, so why waste PCIe lanes (and BOM cost) on a slot there? The increasing trend towards x3 and x4 width cards might mean you'd be able to use the next but one slot (assuming they don't get removed soon...), but even then there isn't really standardisation about what type of PCIe slot goes (or doesn't get fitted) in which position on the motherboard.
- 7speter 4y agoI think this problem will resolve itself. Nvidia pulled out all of the stops with the 4090 because they thought (hoped) they were going to be able to sell it in an insatiable market that was begging for the biggest most powerful die possible, mostly because of mining. Gamers have no appetite for such a monstrosity (the gpu equivalent to national lampoon’s family truckster), and there aren’t really any games on the horizon that requires the 4090’s sheer power. Nvidia is probably going to have no choice but to make smaller, cooler dies with more modest gains relative to lovelace in their next generation because thats what the market will force them to do.
- Ekaros 4y agoOutside certain enthusiast group gamers are somewhat price sensitive. And this new generation went beyond that level. Not yet having anything on acceptable, albeit high price level. But I might be wrong, have to see how sales go after scalpers get burned.
- chii 4y ago> there aren’t really any games on the horizon that requires the 4090’s sheer power but with things like stable-diffusion, such a card might have other uses other than games. For example, live paint-ins for photoshop, and other tidbits that are currently not realistically possible for the consumer.
- 7speter 4y agoSure, but maybe there should be a prosumer line? Or is quadro/titan already that? I just dont know how many gamers are curious about live paint ins for photoshop, or how many gamers can justify *90 costs for video editing and streaming.
- jxramos 4y agoHearing about the EVGA news recently I was asking at work trying to understand the difference between GPU chips and cards and came to understand the form factor a bit more. We were just talking about motherboard CPU sockets and how it’s easier to differentiate the CPU from the motherboard because they’re two separable components. With GPUs they’re bonded to their cards so the visual separation is a lot harder to comprehend without understanding the form factor a bit more closely. It’ll be cool to see GPU sockets on motherboards if that becomes a thing.
- lukaszkups 4y agoTo the author: I see what you did there and I like that Cyberpunk: Edgerunners reference ^,^
- mastax 4y agoAll In One liquid coolers are the answer. They were already getting popular in the RTX 3000 series. They make the card thinner and separate out a lot of the weight. They can't cost much more than some of those massive conventional coolers.
- consp 4y agoAIO coolers do have the tendency to be hit or miss and can seriously impact performance if done incorrectly. If it's out of the box it should probably be fine though but it's not for everyone to replace a GPU cooler and repaste it. With these power hungry beasts my custom loop, outside of a tiny case (the radiators make the pc look silly small and are connected to it with quick couplings) suddenly makes practical sense instead of just being a "let's see what I can do" project.
- hnaccountme 4y agoMaybe its time to have a separate socket for the GPU, like how CPUs are installed. Might need to have gddr slots too. LOL
- virgulino 4y agoI liked the new 4090. 12 fans seems reasonable for a sub 1 kW card. Those 2 AC power connectors on the back are a nice innovation. Great benchmark numbers. That they managed to have 21 cards in stock at launch is fantastic! The 4090 Ti looks fantastic too. Totally worth the risk of fire. https://youtu.be/0frNP0qzxQc https://youtu.be/0frNP0qzxQc
- wtcactus 4y agoAlthough the idea of the author focus solely on how to fit/support the card in the motherboard, and to provide an existing cooling solution, I actually find it a bit too much, this race to higher performance based on increasingly higher power requirements. New NVIDIA cards will draw 450W, and, even if you lower that in settings, the all package will still need to be manufactured to support those 450W at various levels. I wonder what are games doing that require that extra power, seriously. I, personally, would much prefer to slightly have to lower settings (or expect devs to take at least some basic steps to optimize their games) than have a 450W behemoth living inside my computer. Meaning, 40xx series will be an obvious pass for me. My 1080 Ti is actually still great in almost all aspects.
- numpad0 4y agoOne of the issues with that second bracket is there are not many cases that supports it. Mac Pro, HP workstations and desktop servers, and old, cheap looking, bent metal “DOS/V” cases has it, but modern “EATX” cases often don’t. It also cannot support too much weight. Indeed, PCI standards were for adding interfaces to personal desktop computers after all. It does seem ill suited to host 450W cooperative sub-computers. A more common approach to heavy expansion card is VME style chassis design. Off top of my head, NeXTcube, NEC C Bus, Eurocard uses this arrangement in consumer space, and many blade servers enclosures, carrier grade routers, and military digital equipments employ similar designs as well.
- everyone 4y agoWhat always annoys me is that with air cooled gpu the hot air goes down.
- TT-392 4y agoI think a start would be providing an extra screw hole in a standardized place, so that case manifacturers can design for this, instead of putting the card between 2 plastic clamps. A problem here would be length differences in cards though. But I think that it being in the middle of most long cards, and at the end of the smallest card isn't the craziest idea.
- JonChesterfield 4y agoWe don't _need_ new motherboards. Just stop standing the things up on their side. Horizontal case, no problems.
- patates 4y agoThe GPU should be the motherboard and we should install other lowly components (like the central processor) on top of them. But seriously, 450 Watts on this day and age of increasing energy prices? Crazy.
- bmitc 4y agoWhat is the end game of consumer GPUs, primarily for gaming? It seems wasteful (?), not sure of the right word here at the moment, to put all this effort into GPUs for general purpose computers and the downstream problems (cooling, space, mounting, etc.) to get arguable improvements in gaming experiences. There seems to be an outright arms race amongst consumers and manufacturers alike for all this, and I personally am not sure why this stuff is so in demand. Are there other consumer markets where high-performance is so accepted and common place?
- dotancohen 4y ago> Are there other consumer markets where high-performance is so accepted and common place? I don't know about today, but a generation of two ago it was street cars, some time before that horses. Anything measurable will be compared, and people want (more) performance.
- bmitc 4y agoBut performance street cars feel much more niche than gaming rigs. It does feel that performance (or perceived performance) oriented things in the computer market do seem to bleed into the broader market more than other markets. It's an interesting phenomenon.
- trashtester 4y agoEven "normal" cars tend to come with a lot more hp than most people need most of the time (unless they live in Germany or somewhere else where you can actually go really fast if you want to). Cars with a 100-200hp engine would probably be almost as usable with half the power.
- reportgunner 4y agoGaming is becoming more popular and less of a "nerdy" niche thing. Marketing is telling people who are new to gaming that better graphics and more resolution is more gaming so they believe they need to play games in 4k at 240hz.
- puyoxyz 4y ago450 Watts?! Support sticks ?!?! They’ve actually gone insane. What the hell.
- qwerty456127 4y agoBack in the days when I was a kid tower PCs were comparably rare and most of the PCs used the horizontal desktop design which essentially is the same like a tower but put on its side. People would often put the monitor on top of it to save the desk space (see the Windows 95-2000 "my computer" icon). Isn't it time for that to return so we wouldn't need “GPU Support Sticks”? By the way, what actually dissatisfies me is the majority of mainboards having too few PCIex slots. Whenever I buy a PC I want a great extensible future-proof mainboard + very basic everything incl. a cheap graphics card so I can upgrade different parts the moments I feel like . Unfortunately such many-slot maininboards seem to all target the luxury gamer/miner segment and be many times more expensive than ordinary ones. I don't understand why some extra slots have to raise the cost up 10 times.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- wongarsu 4y ago> horizontal desktop design That's be a pretty clever solution. I wonder if any case designers are brave enough to try to pitch that solution. Somewhat fits in the rising popularity of putting your tower on your desk. > I don't understand why some extra slots have to raise the cost up 10 times Part is market differentiation, but the other part is that you quickly run out of PCIe lanes to the CPU (especially with Intel, thanks to their market differentiation). If the mainboard manages to use no more PCIe lanes than the CPU supports, everything is simple. Once you add more or bigger PCIe slots, more M2 slots or more USB3 ports, the mainboard has to include a fairly expensive PCIe switch to turn few lanes into more.
- dawnbreez 4y agoAnother useful feature of the horizontal desktop design is that putting the monitor on the case brings it closer to a comfortable viewing level.
- qwerty456127 4y agoI see. A very good point. Thank you. This reminds me about the explanation of why do USB-C docks have separate USB-2 ports: because every USB-3 lane has a separate USB-2 sub-lane and these are left vacant after using USB-3 lanes to connect an SD card reader and a NIC internally. By the way, about brave horizontal desktop PC designs, note a neighbor comment by c0balt mentions one, to it seems very nice, I would buy one immediately if a traveling salesman would knock my office door offering it without the mental overhead of having to order it and wait.
- draluy 4y agoJust mount the Graphics card vertically using a raiser cable. It more of a PC case problem that a motherboard problem. Also, it allows for better form factors, with spread out components and bigger fans.
- qwerty456127 4y ago> Maybe we can make motherboards with a GPU slot next to the CPU slot and have a unified massive radiator sitting on top of them Sounds reasonable, we already used to have separate CPU and FPU sockets in the distant past. However, isn't it nice every extension card incl. GPU cards uses the same unified connector standard and can by replaced with anything very different in place? Wouldn't switching to the an MXM form-factor, introducing an extra kind of slot, be a step back? Haven't we once ditched a dedicated GPU card slot (AGP) in favour of unification already?
- Thorentis 4y agoWhy do we need to keep plugging the GPU directly into the board? Why can't GPU makers ship cables that go into the PCIe slots, and then connect to the GPU, then we can mount the GPU somewhere else in the case (perhaps case makers can start adding GPU slots where the DVD drives used to go or something).
- fancyfredbot 4y agoNVIDIA makes a socketed version of their data center GPUS. The socket is called SMX. It would be cool if consumer board partners and motherboard manufacturers used it too.
- birdyrooster 4y agoHave you seen cases these days? They already account for this.
- Waterluvian 4y agoAs a kid it felt so weird to me that SLR lenses could be so massive that you mount the camera to it rather than the other way around. This feels like that.
- rasz 4y agoFor GPUs to Collapse Under Their Own Gravity they would need to go below https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarzschild_radius https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarzschild_radius
- pcdoodle 4y agoThis should be fixed by case manufactures working with the other players. Pick a reasonable max length and be done with it. GPUs can come with an extender to meet the case front captive bracket. Nobody agrees on anything anymore. We need standards like those created 30 years ago. But everyone wants to do their own thing without realizing the reason for the inter compatibility is because people got over themselves and worked together.
- alkonaut 4y agoWhy not just make an ATX GPU with a CPU slot on it? With the size and cost of these things, it's the rest of the machine that feels like a peripheral and not the VGA. The GPU is the main part of the machine by cost, weight, complexity, power consumption. And it's not even close.
- phkahler 4y agoJust replace the motherboard with a GPU board with cooling solution on the bottom, and CPU socket on top along with all other connectors. Make them in 2 standard heights so cases can be standardized. The boards will have NO slots since the board IS the video card. This is of course only slightly serious, I prefer to use AMD chips with integrated GPUs and SFF. But for those that care about GPU capability lets just change the priority of the components and build the PC on top of the graphics solution.
- bfgoodrich 4y ago
- Havoc 4y agoThe gamers nexus video is worth a watch for entertainment. The marketing has been cranked up to 11. Graphics cards promising their buyers "absolute dark power". Honestly...
- rafale 4y agoI actually enjoy the hubris.
- nottorp 4y agoWe need a concerted effort to reduce chip power consumption. Hopefully the energy prices in Europe will force chip makers to work on that. I mean, only if they want to sell something over here.
- hlandau 4y agoThe retention mechanism in the PCIe spec he's quoting here isn't metal; it's literally just an extra piece of plastic on the PCIe slot. I've used motherboards with them, they do exist. You have to move it out of the way if you want to remove the card. I don't know that it really adds much mechanically though, it's just a retention mechanism. Since it's part of the PCIe slot, any load it bears is pulling on the same thing: the motherboard. Image: https://www.vortez.net/index.php?ct=articles&action=file&id=12331 https://www.vortez.net/index.php?ct=articles&action=file&id=... It does feel like GPUs are getting rather ridiculous and pushing the limits. PCIe SIG seems to keep having to specify editions of the PCIe add-in-card electromechanical spec authorising higher power draws, and sometimes it seems like these limits imposed by the standard are just ignored.