Question Best graphics card for vertical (I/O-up) mounting?

[_Rick_]

Although this might sound like a graphics card question, it's really about heatpipes!

I suspect that despite some studies showing that there's no problem with heatpipe orientation, there's a definite impact, and the longer the card, the further towards the I/O the GPU is located on the card, the worse the cooling performance will be.
I'm currently running a triple-fan 3070 (which already didn't perform well in another case, where it was "vertically" mounted in a desktop enclosure. Now I had to power limit it to ~75% and it still occasionally goes into fail-safe shutdown. At least the fans don't ramp to 4k rpm. While I do suspect a bad thermal interface as one issue, I also think that the cooling architecture is not great for the "tower" case (Fortress FT03) it's in now.

Since that case doesn't have any room for radiators beyond 120mm, I'm considering replacing the card (which was an urgent replacement for a 2080 super which died of pump failure in early 2021) with something air-cooled.
I guess the 4080 super founder's might be an option (if it fits), as hopefully the vapor-chamber operates slightly more reliably than 7-inch heatpipes with all the liquid stuck on the cold side...
Another option could be the Ventus 2x MSI 4070Ti super. Lower TDP is always good, and the card is only 10 inches long, so naturally heatpipes will be shorter, hopefully alleviating some of the issues.

Anything else I should be looking for? Or is that kind of mount just dead in the day of 300W-cards?

 

[aigomorla]

There are still more cases then i can count with 1 hand that uses that style.
Honestly i think its a better orientation then having the GPU floating horizontal on its pci-e extension, and risk pcb fracture.

The FT03 should not have a problem with your 3070.
You should log the temps to see if it really is a thermal shutdown, or it can be a transient power spike coming from your GPU.

The 3000 series were notorious for having some extreme cases of these.

 

[CP5670]

The AIO cards are really good for this. I would mount mine this way, but the CPU heatsink gets in the way. If I had a CPU AIO too, it would easily fit though.

 

[_Rick_]

There are still more cases then i can count with 1 hand that uses that style.
Honestly i think its a better orientation then having the GPU floating horizontal on its pci-e extension, and risk pcb fracture.

The FT03 should not have a problem with your 3070.
You should log the temps to see if it really is a thermal shutdown, or it can be a transient power spike coming from your GPU.

The 3000 series were notorious for having some extreme cases of these.

Power could be an issue, but since I am power-limiting the card for thermal reasons and still getting fail-safe states, it would be unintuitive.
But not impossible. I would expect the power transient to affect the entire system though, not just the video card. The system usually only dies a couple of minutes later, if at all...

Regarding AIO cards: there are no 40xx series cards left with smaller than 240mm radiators.
I could overpay for an Inno3D 3080Ti with a 120mm rad, but then I would probably also have to plop an AIO on my CPU, or at least remove the fan from the cooler. Otherwise the rad ends up underneath the block, which would again tend to put the air bubble in the wrong spot..

I do like the AIO cards in general (swapped the 3070 for a 3080 with 240mm rad in the machine it came from) , but they outgrew my office case.