Upgradeable Video Cards. Why Not?

[moonbogg]

Know what I think? I think someone should make an upgradeable video board. Why the hell not? Buy a new chip a couple times before replacing the whole thing. There could be several upgrade options for the same family of video board. You buy the main board for a lower price, and then choose your performance bracket by deciding on a chip. You can then upgrade the chip. Of course, GPUs are cheap enough to just buy the whole damn thing, but then again so are PCs in general. So why not?
Had that titan for 9 months already and want something faster? Buy the 780ti GPU and install it!

 

[Gunbuster]

So the video "motherboard" for a GTX 760 would need to have all the expensive cooling and power supply to handle a 780ti. Please go back to the pie in the sky drawing board.

I wont even go into what a nightmare discrete memory modules would be...

 

[SunnyD]

You mean something like this?

Because it's impractical due to the amount to performance from the chip and memory subsystems you'd be leaving on the table because of the thermal and power solution design limitations imposed by such a setup.

 

[NTMBK]

They should just put it on a socket on the motherboard.

Hey, they could integrate it with the CPU, too!

 

[Zodiark1593]

This would be more useful for laptops compared to desktops.

 

[blackened23]

What about up-gradable VRAM? I can't imagine a PCB being all that useful from generation to generation as those tend to change quite a bit over time. But maybe VRAM. User up-gradable VRAM sounds pretty cool. 😉

 

[Yuriman]

What about up-gradable VRAM? I can't imagine a PCB being all that useful from generation to generation as those tend to change quite a bit over time. But maybe VRAM. User up-gradable VRAM sounds pretty cool. 😉

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't GDDR5 have to be soldered? You'd have to regress to DDR4.

 

[moonbogg]

What about up-gradable VRAM? I can't imagine a PCB being all that useful from generation to generation as those tend to change quite a bit over time. But maybe VRAM. User up-gradable VRAM sounds pretty cool. 😉

That would make way too much sense.

 

[Lonyo]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't GDDR5 have to be soldered? You'd have to regress to DDR4.

I would thing the PCB traces would be a nightmare, plus the way it works is that you have pretty much each chip wired to a controller, so you probably couldn't do the desktop style sticks with multiple chips.
That means it would take up a lot more space, and routing would suck, massively increasing PCB costs as well, and potentially size, and screwing up the cooler too because either they would need to be rear mounted, or a nightmare on the front.
It would also reduce the RAM you could fit on the board.

There are so many reasons it's impractical for high end cards, and for lower end cards it's basically a waste of effort since most people wouldn't upgrade the RAM on a lower end card.

 

[Blitzvogel]

Long ago, in a galaxy, far, far away.....

 

[Zanovar]

Long ago, in a galaxy, far, far away.....

haha this,i see the ponits being made and would be cool.)