Would this idea fly?

[her209]

Making video cards that can have expandable RAM and upgradable GPUs? For the serious gamer, they can max out the amt of memory supported along with the high end GPU. But for the ave user, the bare minimum is sufficient.

So what do you guys think?

 

[merlocka]

no.

such a small percentage of people would care about this that no one would even spend a penny to make this happen.

 

[zsouthboy]

you realize to design a card like this would be a major PITA .. AND it won't be profitable. do you KNOW how extremely hard it would be to keep stuff clean when you have traces for expandable memory on the card? you just doubled the complexity of the thing, raising the cost for that "low end user" also.

GPU change size and shape and signaling i might add so often that it would be very bad for progress if, when you had to create a new GPU, it has to do this, this, and this because its GPUsocket 842 or whatever.

 

[Lizardman]

The video card itself is this expandable thing you are thinking of. Low end users buy a geforce4 mx. Gamers buy a Geforce 4200.

Why make the end user put the ram and gpu on there himself.

 

[Jeff7]

They used to have videocards with expandable memory - upgrade your 2MB S3 videocard to 4MB maybe. RAM was expensive too - it got to the point that it was almost as cheap to buy a new videocard as to buy some more RAM for it. But that was stopped completely; I've not seen an upgradable card for years now. Since the components run so fast these days, the circuit boards need to be designed for specific parts to ensure proper timings. Upgrading the chip would not be much help either - each generation of chip uses a different layout. You couldn't put an NV30 chip into a Geforce4 Ti4600 board; it'd be sort of like trying to have a P4 processor fit in a Socket 7 motherboard.