Originally posted by: mercanucaribe
Originally posted by: mindless1
It's not a passively cooled system, the difference in orientation is not very important. To ensure compatibility it remains in same configuration previously used before heat levels rose as much and due to that standardized config, it can't be flipped over due to possiblity of interference with parts above it (like a northbridge heatsink).
A video card with the chips facing up would allow bigger heatsinks and not require "2 slot solutions". It makes no sense that they kept PCIE cards facing the same way. The only reason PCI was upside down was so you could have a PCI and an ISA slot for the same expansion bay. If anything they should have put PCIE rightside up to allow PCI and PCIE in the same location!!
In a half-baked kinda way you're right, if we ignore that there is no keep-out zone above the slot so the boards were all designed differently to ensure the area was empty. It does make sense with PCIE for this reason just as it did with AGP. They can't change card orientation until other things are changed to make way for that.
LIke many parts of a computer, these design decisions were made without any forethought, as to how much power some cards would eventually use in this case. Even so, in many situations it is splitting hairs, you can't just indefinitely increase heatsink size because of the weight increase, and any wise installer is going to make any video card a "2 slot solution" regardless of heatsink height, the video card should not have a PCI card adjacent to it even if the 'sink were short enough to wedge one in.
To this extent having the hotter components on the other side would be an improvement, but maybe you're also forgetting that for best cooling you don't want all the hottest parts jammed up against each other. Already there was northbridge, CPU and memory within a couple inches of each other, it's not such a good idea to see how close to these we can add a video card that is (supposedly) hot enough running it needs an especially large heatsink. SO then, we could move that PCI Express slot down a little further away, but it will have the same result of loss of a slot (or at least usage of it) one way or the other.
The only real problem with video card cooling is when manufacturers foolishly use either a loud squirrel cage type radial fan or a far too thin and high RPM axial fan. It creates excess noise unnecessarily and contributes to early failure. Otherwise what we have now works, besides the issue of having the 4X PCI Express slots taking away from # of PCI but barely any PCI Express cards in the market desirable enough to use besides the video cards.
What you're wanting isn't impossible, just unworkable on ATX. The whole layout will have to be shifted around. One board with enough room is not enough, they'd ALL have to have that much room besides the zone heat density issue I'd already mentioned.
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