I have a hardware related question, mainly related to video cards and heat

[coolred]

A friend and i were talking and came up with this question, we have our ideas to the answer, but would like more opinions.

In a standard ATX computer, the GPU on the video card is facing downward, like toward the bottom of the case, heat rises, so why would you want the GPU on the bottom where all the heat will rise and pass right past it?

 

[ScrapSilicon]

heat rises and cooler air would be flowing in at the bottom

 

[AnAndAustin]

Yes, although the heat can often become trapped under the card, if the card was the 'right' way up the heat would rise naturally and be sucked out by the case fans or PSU. IIRC it was only upside down in the first place in order to make it possible to share a slot with a PCI card. It would be interesting to see what diffs it would make ...

 

[coolred]

Well thats something I wasn't even thinking of, thanks for pointing that out. I knew that PCI and AGP cards faced differant directions, it just never clicked in my head. So that was why it was originally done, but why hasn't someone corrected it.

 

[coolred]

But just because it faces down, why can't they just stick the components on the top side?

 

[Brian48]

Because now you'd have a situation where the video card heatsink and/or capacistors would collide with the motherboard capacistors and/or processor, especially if you're still using a slot 1 or slot a motherboard.

 

[coolred]

I didn't realize the capacitors were that close to the video card.

 

[coolred]

Okay but in that case, why don't they change the orienation fo the card so that rather then being connected to the top of the metal bracket its connected to the bottom, that would allow enough room for clearance.

 

[Brian48]

Only if you install the thing in a standard mid to full tower. On a mini, you'd now might have the some of the components on the card colliding with either a hard drive or floppy.

Bottomline, there's no one solution except to follow the same, out-dated specs developed by Intel years ago. Thats the only way to insure max compatibility for max sales.

 

[coolred]

How so, the parts should not be any higher then what the top of the card is now?

 

[Viper96720]

Didn't someone ask this question already?

 

[Brian48]

Originally posted by: coolred
How so, the parts should not be any higher then what the top of the card is now?

Not sure what you're talking about. I thought you meant having everything facing up, but towards the end away from the bracket (?).

In any case, no one is going to deviate from the standard industry specs. It's too big of a risk towards sales. Every manufacturer of every piece of hardware, not just video cards, has to conform to a certain spec. If they deviate too much from it, even on a minute scale, it can be a very costly affair. Something will always get in the way of something else.

A good example of this is the Epox 8kha+. The capacistors near the end of the AGP slot was just a little too tall and overspec'd no more than a millimeter. The deviation was so small, it did no harm until the ti4600 came along. A review of the Visiontek ti4600 showed that the card would not fit on this board because the capacistor on the card collided with the capacistor on the motherboard. In the time span that Epox (whom caught a lot of flak for this) and Visiontek sorted this problem out, Visiontek lost a lot of potential sales even though this problem would have effected other reference design ti4600s.

 

[coolred]

All I am saying is instead of mounting the card to the top of the metal bracket and facing it down, mount it to the bottom of the metal braket and face it up, I think that would work for most video cards as the card would not take up ant more space. Granted this would not likely work for the geforce FX.