That was mostly about Nvidia's pricing. It's basically impossible to compete economically with the founders editions because Nvidia doesn't charge themselves a hefty markup on the chip. That's why their own cards always sell out instantly and then the aftermarket GPU builders can fight to pick up the scraps. The whole idea of the founders edition seems to be to make a quick buck immediately after release. Long term it's much more profitable to sell the chip itself at a price that they would usually sell their entire GPU for.

This years founders edition is what I really want from a GPU. Stop wasting my 2nd PCIe slot because you've made it 3.5/4 slots BIG! It is insane that they are now cooling 575W with two slots in height.

I would suggest getting a case that has a set of inbuilt (typically vertically-oriented) expansion card slots positioned a distance away from the regular expansion card slots, mount your graphics card there, and connect it to the motherboard with a PCI-E riser cable. It's what I did and I kicked myself for not doing it years prior.

I have no experience with PCI-E 5 cables, but I've a PCI-E 4 riser cable from Athena Power that works just fine (and that you can buy right now on Newegg). It doesn't have any special locking mechanism, so I was concerned that it would work its way off of the card or out of the mobo slot... but it has been in place for years now with no problem.

Can you link to an example case and riser cable?

I shouldn't have to link to the cable given that I said "Athena Power" and "Newegg", but sure, here you go. [0] Their Newegg store is here. [1] (They also sell that cable in different lengths.)

The "away from motherboard expansion card slots feature" isn't particularly uncommon on cases. One case that came up with a quick look around is the Phanteks Enthoo Pro 2. [2] I've seen other case manufacturers include this feature, but couldn't be arsed to spend more than a couple of minutes looking around to find more than one example to link to.

Also, there are a few smaller companies out there that make adapters [3] that will screw into a 140mm fan mounting hole and serve as an "away from motherboard" mounting bracket. You would need to remove any grilles from the mounting hole to make use of this for a graphics card.

[0] https://www.newegg.com/athena-power-8-extension-cable-black/...

[1] https://www.newegg.com/Athena-Power/BrandStore/ID-1849

[2] https://phanteks.com/product/enthoo-pro-2-tg

[3] Really, they're usually just machined metal rectangular donuts... calling them "adapters" makes them sound fancier than they are.

Man, things are getting really large and unwieldy with these giant GPUs we have nowadays.

My theory is this is one of the ways nvidia is trying to force ML users to buy the $$$$$ workstation cards.

Can't put four 4090s into your PC if every 4090 is 3.5 slots!

You can do single slot 4090 cards using water cooling, so having enormous coolers is not forcing anyone to buy workstation cards to fit things. Alternatively, there are always cases designed for riser cables.

It is an ever uphill battle to compete with Nvidia as a AIB partner.

Nvidia has internal access to the new card way ahead of time, has aerodynamic and thermodynamic simulators, custom engineered boards full of sensors, plus a team of very talented and well paid engineers for months in order to optimize cooler design.

Meanwhile AIB partners is pretty much kept in the blind until a few months in advance. It is basically impossible for a company like EVGA to exist as they pride themselves in their customer support - the finances just does not make sense.

Which is why EVGA stopped working with Nvidia a few years ago... (probably mentioned elsewhere too).

https://www.electronicdesign.com/technologies/embedded/artic...