IdiotInCharge
NVIDIA SHILL
- Joined
- Jun 13, 2003
- Messages
- 14,675
Big challenge with a modern FT-02 is that the original was designed for a scenario where a user would actually want a stack of spinners, optical drives as well as readouts and perhaps even resevoirs in the 5.25" bays, and had multiple GPUs with blowers, and so on.
These days we simply don't use that much hardware for a gaming workstation. A 240mm radiator for the CPU and a 120mm radiator for the GPU and you're in the top 5% of gaming performance available using non-exotic cooling. At most, you'd need expansion for more NVMe drives than most boards support and higher-speed networking (dual 10GbE or faster) to access network-attached mass storage, beyond the single top-end gaming GPU with AIO.
Worse is the ROI on these. As price rises linearly, sales drop exponentionally, since most volume customers in such a category are more than likely buying a box from HP or Dell that comes with support for the whole system. That leaves a very, very thin potential customer base!
These days we simply don't use that much hardware for a gaming workstation. A 240mm radiator for the CPU and a 120mm radiator for the GPU and you're in the top 5% of gaming performance available using non-exotic cooling. At most, you'd need expansion for more NVMe drives than most boards support and higher-speed networking (dual 10GbE or faster) to access network-attached mass storage, beyond the single top-end gaming GPU with AIO.
Worse is the ROI on these. As price rises linearly, sales drop exponentionally, since most volume customers in such a category are more than likely buying a box from HP or Dell that comes with support for the whole system. That leaves a very, very thin potential customer base!