I have a MSI RTX 3070 2 fan model. It hasn't damaged my PCI-E slot (I think), but it's weight and sag causes some bending that now makes it so that my fan bearing makes a loud noise if spun up high.
My solution has been to turn my PC case so the motherboard is parallel to the ground and the GPU sticks straight up, eliminating the sag. Whisper quiet now.
If this is happening with my GPU, I shudder to imagine what it's like with other GPUs out there which are much bigger and heavier.
After it happened the 3rd time I just cleaned up a little space and put the PC lying on its side. Zero problems since then.
The screw should have plenty of surface area to properly secure the card. You'll still have _some_ sag, but my 3 pin 3090 doesn't sag half as badly as examples I've seen of much smaller cards
Yes. I've seen both a heavy GPU and an HSM card damage a slot. One happened when a machine was shipped by a commercial shipper. The other happened when the machine was moved between residences. It doesn't occur to people that the mass of a card swinging around is a problem when the case is moved.
The HSM one was remarkable in that it was a full length card with a proper case support on both ends.
Also, this isn't just about damaging the PCI-E slot. Heavy cards bend PCBs (both the MB and the dangling card) and bending PCBs is a bad idea: surface mount devices can crack, especially MLCCs, and solder joints aren't flexible either. No telling how many unanalyzed failures happen due to this.
If you have a big GPU don't let it dangle. Support it somehow.
Another area where the conventional layout is struggling is NVME. They keep getting hotter and so the heatsinks keep getting larger. Motherboard designers are squeezing in NVME slots wherever they can, often where there is little to no airflow...
Huh. Good point. I'll be moving soon, and have kept the box my case came in as well as the foam inserts for either end of the case. I might just remove the GPU and put it back in its own box for the move, as well. Thanks for bringing that up.
Or remove it. Takes five minutes to unplug and unscrew a card. Had to do that with my 6900xt recently while moving.
4. Don't forget high end GPUs are also getting longer, not just thicker. So increasing sizes both give and take away weight advantages
PCIe extenders are a thing already. Current PC case fashion trends have already influenced the inclusion of extenders and a place to vertically mount the GPU to the case off the motherboard.
GPU sag is also a bit of a silly problem for the motherboard to handle when $10 universal GPU support brackets already exist.
It does look a little cool, but I always worry a little about the reliability of the cable itself. Does it REALLY meet the signal integrity specifications for PCI-E? Probably not. But, no unexplained crashes or glitches so far and this build is over 2 years old.
You'd want to somehow monitor the PCIe bus error rate - with a marginal signal and lots of errors -> retries, something that loads the bus harder (loading new textures etc) could suffer way more.
They do briefly show a different PCIe riser made out of generic ribbon cable [1, 3:27], and say that one failed after chaining only two ~200mm lengths. The quality of the riser cable certainly matters.
The 650 Ti is PCIe 3.0. PCIe 4.0 doubles the bandwidth. PCIe 5.0 doubles the bandwidth again. The RTX 40 series GPUs still use PCIe 4.0, which have commonly available conformant riser cables. I suspect the story for PCIe 5.0 will be different.
Only downside is the case has to be taller. Not sure if that would be considered a problem or not.
This doesn’t really help dual GPU setups, but those have never been common. I don’t have a good solution there. I guess you’re back to some variation of the riser idea.
Thinking about it though isn’t that where a lot of motherboards put a lot of their power regulation circuitry? I’m sure something would have to move.
But excellent point. That could easily bet a much bigger sticking point that I didn’t really consider too much.
Not necessarily. A flexible interconnect would allow the GPU to be planar with the MB; just bend it 180 degrees. Now your GPU and CPU can have coolers with good airflow instead of the farcical CPU (125mm+ tall heatsinks...) and GPU cooling designs (three fans blowing into the PCB and exhausting through little holes...) prevailing today.
My idea is to separate the whole CPU complex (the CPU and heatsink, RAM slots, VR, etc.) from everything else and use short, flexible interconnects to attach GPUs, NVMe and backplane slots to the CPU PCB, arranged in whatever scheme you wish.
If you “folded” the GPU over the CPU to save height I would think that would be worse than today for heat.
Maybe I’ve got this backwards. Give up on PCIe, or put it above the rest of the motherboard. The one GPU slot, planar to the motherboard, stays below. Basically my previous idea flipped vertically.
The other PCIe slots don’t need to run as fast and may be able to take the extra signal distance needed. The GPU could secure to the backplane (like my original idea) but would have tons of room for cooling like the CPU.
Why? Cooling would be far better: the CPU and GPU heatsinks would both face outward from the center and receive clean front-to-rear airflow. Thus, looking down from above:
intake air --> [cpu heatsink] exhaust -->
[cpu+vrm+ram+chipset]
---------pcb----------
| <-- CPU/GPU interconnect
---------pcb----------
[gpu+ram+etc]
intake air --> [gpu heatsink] exhaust -->
I've been refining this. I'm actually learning FreeCAD to knock out a realistic 3D model.
One obvious change: run the CPU/GPU interconnect across the bottom: existing GPU designs could be used unmodified (or enhanced with only a new heatsink) and the 16x PCI-E lanes for the GPU would be easier to route off the CPU PCB.
There are virtually no significant differences between the motherboard layout IBM promulgated with original IBM PC (model 5150) in 1981 and what we have today. That machine had a 63W power supply and no heatsinks or fans outside the power supply. The solution to all existing problems with full featured, high power desktop machines is replacing the obsolescent motherboard design with something that accommodates what people have been building for at least 20 years now (approximately since the Prescott era and the rise of high power GPUs.)
They are with the people who spend the most money on GPUs
Seems with the last GPU generation most enthusiast websites recommend to go for a bigger card instead of going SLI.
I have to admit I have not seen that front bracket for a long time. some server chassis have a bar across the top to support large cards. this would bet great except gfx card manufacturers like to exceed the pci spec for height. that bar had to be removed on my last two builds. now days I just put my case horizontal and pray.
I've also had the vertical clearance issue since I try to rack mount all my gear now I've got a soundproof rack, its very annoying to need more than 4U of space just to fit a video card in a stable vertical orientation.
It's quite common to suffer damage from movement, especially in shipping, to the point where integrated PC manufacturers have to go to great lengths to protect the GPU in transit.
And I’m sure the licensing bros will come out and shout about licensing or something irrelevant. My dudes, I operate 3090s in the data center, it saves boatloads of money for both upfront, licensing, power and therefore TCO, and fuck NVIDIA.
I said don't ship them. I did not say don't build prebuilt systems.
And how the hell do you not ship them? You're not making any sense here. There's no alternative to not shipping them, not unless you're planning on having system builders show up individually to clients' houses and assemble PCs on the spot. That business model is way less economically efficient than simply assembling PCs centrally and accepting some breakage in shipment.
Just star designing motherboards with integrated GPUs of sufficient size.
Case closed.
It's only the cheap components without a wide variety of options that make sense to build in, like WiFi, USB, and Ethernet.
The GPU is also one of the easiest components to swap today. That's not something I want to give up unless I see performance improvements. Cooling doesn't count because I already have an external radiator attached to my open-frame "case".
I went through 3 GPUs before changing motherboards and I'm still bottlenecked on my 3090, not my 5800X3D. After I get a 4090, I expect to upgrade it at least once before getting a new mobo.
Right now you can just switch the graphics card out for another and keep everything else the same.
One of the most prominent examples is the entire Apple Silicon lineup, which has the GPU integrated as part of the SoC, and is powerful enough to drive relatively recent games. (No idea just what its limits are, but I'm quite happy with the games my M1 Max can play.)
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).