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why are gpu's upside down when fitted to an atx mobo?

I guess maybe its cause of space and cooling decisions.

With the way the ATX board is designed, having all the heatsinks, capacitors and stuff from the graphics card at the top will get in the way of other motherboard components like the Northbridge heatsink or RAM slots.

And about the cooling, it will just suck in hot air from the top of the case (Heat rises) down onto the chip which isn't really ideal. And especially when the CPU and its heatsink are right above so that may conflict with each other.
 
I don't think the original ATX design foresaw that graphics cards would become so big and important in a lot of systems.

BTX mobos/cases are nice; better cooling and fancy graphics card stickers on show! But they never really took off.
 
If you get some of that mirrored plastic film that you stick on van windows to stop people seeing inside, cut it to shape and stick it to the bottom of your case, you'll get a reflection of the 'pretty' side of the graphics card so the view's not wasted.
 
In my stock DELL computer the graphics card is the right way up as the motherboard is mounted on the left (face forward) instead of the right like my antec 1200.
 
Well heat rises and most towers have an intake fan at the bottom front, so it wouldn't make sense to have it the other way as the GPU would just be sucking warm air from the CPU area.
 
Arnt graphis cards designed this was so that they suck in cool air from the bottom of the case.
if it was facing upwards which they could do, it would interfere with airflow aound the cpu an cause temps to rise. ;)
 
Fine in my case :-)

inside.jpg
 
Pretty simple answer, for many years, early PC's didnt have PCI / PCIe slots, they had ISA slots. ISA slots were the other was around.

When PCI was invented, it was designed to be the other way around, so that motherboards could support both PCI and ISA in the same "slot" by placing the motherboard connectors on either side of the actual slot on the cases. It was common on boards with both ISA and PCI to have at least 1 shared slot.

In addition, it also makes it impossble to try and force a PCI card into an ISA slot, as the position of the slot on the motherboard is completely opposite. The shorter 8 bit ISA slots would probably have been able to accept the larger half of a PCI connector as the end of the slot rougly coincides with the "key" of the PCI slot. Expansion slots were intended to be simple enough for "end users", and there are plenty of end users who might well have tried to force a PCI card into an ISA slot if they hadnt switched the position of the connector.

AGP and PCIe slots are both physically located in the PCI slot position, but keyed and positioned to be completely incompatible with PCI cards.

Its also worth pointing out that IBM didnt design the PC as a "Tower" its a desktop system. Mounting an ATX board in a desktop puts less stress on the slots, and the cpu. Some tower case designers do invert the boards, by putting the motherboard on the left hand side of the case.
 
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