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I'v been wondering

E

Evil Result

Weaksauce
Joined
Mar 17, 2004
Messages
77
Everytime I see a video card the GPU is always facing down twords the PCI slots. With the heat sink and fan installed it can consume a PCI slot, if it dosen't there wouldn't be enough space for the fan to breathe if a card is placed directly underneath.

So why don't designers place the GPU facing up where there would be plenty of room for larger heatsinks to be used for quite cooling, and GPU designers woulden't have to be worried as much about how much heat there processors are putting out to how much space they have to work in the heatsink.

Although as of now it probley dosen't matter nor do i see any body giving any thought to it, it just something that been on my mind. Is there some sort of technical snafu?
 
I think i can answer this one....

There is a certain amount of space that a card is allowed to take up. With ISA, they put the cards on the (looking from top) side of that space so that one side would have most of the clearance. When PCI was designed, the designers anticipated motherboards that would put both connectors on some slots.

pci_isa.jpg

I know these are on a riser card, just imagine the same thing on a mobo.

To do so, they had to switch the side that had all the clearance, like how it is now. When AGP came along, it was kept the same way as AGP, as it would probably just replace a PCI slot, and not be intermixed as in teh pic. The spec doesn't allow for cards to go outside the slot because computers are not limited to one AGP slot; there has just never been a motherboard( is there even a chipset?) that implements this.

Like said above, I think PCI express does like you said.
 
its the agp and atx spec, its designed that way on purpose

there has to be a certain amount of space above the video card to the chipset and cpu on the mobo

if you look up the atx specifications it goes into more detail on the measurements

pci-e will be the same, because its still an atx style motherboard

now, what could change this would be the new btx form factor
 
The BTX standard will hopefully not change anything in this respect. I think that the cards are supposed to be at the top, with the cpu at the bottom. In other words, current cards will have their gpus facing away from pci cards.
 
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