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Card sizes

gjbf1

gjbf1

gjbf1

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Joined
15 Dec 2010
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My sister in law is looking at a budget build so I said she could have my GTX970 and showed her. She was shocked and amazed by the size of it (she knows nothing about hardware).

Can you imagine if I buy a 4090 and show her that... She might throw her back out trying to pick it up!

Joking aside, cards are so huge now it's getting silly. They're basically bigger than motherboards. Is it possible we might see ATX standards thrown out, and we start attaching other components to the graphics cards instead of the other way around lol.
 
Nah the future is a smaller motherboard with a CPU socket, 3 pcie slots and 4 m.2 slots, double sided motherboard too so it sits in the middle of a chasis. Pcie 1 for a GPU processor, pcie 2 for vram/dram board and the third for AI acceleration (think physics board days)
All interconnected with nano fibre lines.

But on a serious note I don't think the ATX standard will change as crossfire and SLI are not utilised anymore. Ok so you can get a soundcard, capture card, m.2 card and a networking card but the percentage of people who use all the slots is probably quite small versus the majority of people.
 
Nah atx standards won't be thrown out for bigger boards. Bigger boards already exist but I think smaller boards are becoming more popular today.
 
I was joking that the graphics card will become the central unit lol.

In seriousness ATX is obviously too well entrenched.
 
A modern graphics card is pretty close to being a seperate computer in itself (with a very powerful processor), so in that sense they're quite small.

EDIT: There's even a graphics card that allows you to mount an NVME drive on the graphics card rather than the motherboard. So that's part of the way to making the graphics card also be the motherboard :)
 
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I'm old enough to remember full length ISA cards which had a little plastic clip thing on the end of the car which slotted into rails the front of the case, they were 12 1/2 inches i think which is about the same as a modern high end card, but nowhere near as thick obviously as they didn't have any heatsinks.

Things have just come full circle, it's a shame we don't' use those rail things anymore as it'd stop the sagging problem.
 
Angilion said:
A modern graphics card is pretty close to being a seperate computer in itself (with a very powerful processor), so in that sense they're quite small.

EDIT: There's even a graphics card that allows you to mount an NVME drive on the graphics card rather than the motherboard. So that's part of the way to making the graphics card also be the motherboard :)
Click to expand...

Haha I didn't know that!
 
Angilion said:
A modern graphics card is pretty close to being a seperate computer in itself (with a very powerful processor), so in that sense they're quite small.

EDIT: There's even a graphics card that allows you to mount an NVME drive on the graphics card rather than the motherboard. So that's part of the way to making the graphics card also be the motherboard :)
Click to expand...
A GPU like a 4090 is probably a VERY powerful computer if it could work on its own, they managed to install Windows 11 inside the VRAM I think?
 
gjbf1 said:
Haha I didn't know that!
Click to expand...

It sort of makes sense. When nvidia crudely hacked the 4060 down to 8 PCI-E lanes as part of their coerced upgrading strategy, they left 8 unused lanes that are physically accessible to the card (and not usable by anything else other than the card). So one card company added a socket for an NVME SSD to one of the 4060 cards they produce, which connects to the unused 8 PCI-E lanes. It's only part way to the graphics card being the motherboard. The motherboard is still the key connection between components and still handles moving data around, which is of course necessary for compatibility. The OS won't be looking at the graphics card for an SSD. The GPU won't be looking at the graphics card for an SSD. But it's a thing. It would be more convenient to access than a socket on the motherboard, access to which might well be at least partially obstructed by a cooler. This socket is on the back of the graphics card, which is much more accessible. But it requires a deliberately hobbled graphics card, one that only uses 8 lanes while tying up 16 lanes.

willhub said:
A GPU like a 4090 is probably a VERY powerful computer if it could work on its own, they managed to install Windows 11 inside the VRAM I think?
Click to expand...

Windows 11 can be installed in 200MB. You can put it in the graphics card VRAM, but it's more of a "can we do this?" thing than a "this is useful" thing. It wasn't running on the graphics card, just installed on it. VRAM as a RAM drive with the whole OS on it.

A modern graphics card has the hardware needed to be a complete computer in itself, but it would need some redesigning for that purpose and you'd need to write an OS for it. The existing BIOS would be a start, but it's not a whole OS. And you'd just end up with something that already exists - a general purpose programmable computer. It's a fun idea to play with and it's technically possible and it does provide a different perspective to the physical size of modern graphics cards (most of which is the cooler rather than the actual card), but I don't think we'll see it happening any time soon. Also, I'm not sure about how powerful it would be in practice as a general purpose computer. The processing power of GPUs is strongly rooted in them being massively parallel. The individual compute units aren't very powerful, but there are a lot of them. Which is great for compute jobs that are massively parallel, but many aren't.
 
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