Mini PCIe graphics cards??

[Edward78]

Why not, they could clearly make them. Hav you seen how small GPUs are in laptops, all they need to do is make that a mini-PCIe card. Maybe they think there is no interest, but imagine how awesome that would be to be able to have a smaller desktop, with a mini-itx with a upgradeable GPU.

 

[cmndr_andi]

Yea, GPUs are tiny on laptops, but this doesn't take into account the cooling system which is integrated into the laptop and connected to the mobile GPU by a heatpipe(s).

At the moment I think desktop GPU size is constrained by power output and required cooler size - though if you look at the low-end HTPC cards with small heat outputs then they can be very small. This one for example is low-profile, single slot and relatively short - so would work well in a small Mini-ITX build.

Card manuafacturers probably could make graphics cards with a shorter PCIE slot (eg a x4 PCIE gen2 slot generally works fine for low/mid range graphics cards) but I think the problem is demand. There really aren't many nano-ITX boards out there used by customers and they don't generally support the mainstream CPUs (as well as GPUs) people want to use, while the larger mini-ITX standard is seeing a lot of love with Z68 boards now available in this form factore. My guess is that as progress marches on it will be possible to run mainstream CPUs in such a small form factor - then will see a wave of new boards come out and a smaller graphics card connector would be demanded by many.