Vertical GPU mounting?

danlightbulb · 28 Aug 2020 at 16:27

Bit bored so planning my next build as I'm planning a big PC refresh when the next gen stuff appears.

Have seen vertical GPU mounting in some photos here and it seems to have some significant benefits not least preventing GPU sag and enabling the card to be seen better especially if its a looker or you've gone for some RGB fans on it.

However it doesn't seem to be a common choice outside of big showcase type builds and I'm wondering why?

I know you need the extra mount, although it seems some cases even come with these and with dedicated vertical PCI slot plate covers sometimes two and sometimes three slots wide in wider cases.

Why isn't this more common?

With the suspected size of the new 3000 series cards, sag could be a much bigger problem as well.

Which cases offer the best vertical mounting solution?

AfrogoatST · 28 Aug 2020 at 16:41

From my understanding the issue is the fact that in most cases it doesnt allow very good air flow to the graphics card, as quite often the fans for the GPU are very close to the case window.

Mr Evil · 28 Aug 2020 at 16:52

I had to read your post twice before I realized that you mean having the card oriented with the PCIe connector at the bottom. It's also possible to vertically mount a GPU with the backplate at the top. The latter is how mine is oriented, and it works quite well, though some GPUs have the heatpipes the wrong way around to work optimally in that position.

danlightbulb · 28 Aug 2020 at 17:13

Mr Evil said:
It's also possible to vertically mount a GPU with the backplate at the top.

I don't know what you mean by this, got a picture?

Mr Evil · 28 Aug 2020 at 17:31

danlightbulb said:
I don't know what you mean by this, got a picture?

I didn't mean backplate, I meant PCI bracket. Like this:

danlightbulb · 28 Aug 2020 at 17:48

Oh so your card is hanging really then I guess, hence no sag.

Hmm, all the connectors coming out the top though. Its like the PC is laid on its front.

pp111 · 29 Aug 2020 at 07:30

I get round sag my making a custom acrylic support for the card. Just a cut piece of acrylic that supports it at one end. If you spend some time making something shiny it looks rather nice. And its cheap and effective.
My one worry about orientation of boards is signal path! I guess I am just being stupid, since the adapters obviously work, but thing with parallel buses is that a limiting factor on the frequency is the path length variations of each path. That's why they moved away from parallel interfaces for hard drives and intel wanted to go to serial RAM. Does away with the parallel timing problems. I always worry that it will affect the integrity of the signal. I guess it doesn't otherwise they wouldn't sell them, but it just kinda worries me, lol.