These cards get bigger and bigger. Next thing you know, the video card will be like a power supply. 1 big box that connects to the motherboard via one big cable.
To the best of my knowledge the PCB is the same size as the 8800 Ultra, it's just much thicker. So much so that I think I wouldn't be able to use any of my SATA ports on my Asus p35 mobo (p5k premium). You already lose 2 if you have an 8800 Ultra, I wonder how many get caught out by this.
Actually, that's not a bad idea.. then I could just plug it into my laptop as a secondary video boost and have awesome graphics, essentially just using my onboard processor, keyboard and screen and letting the external box do the rest. That way graphics become portable and more affordable.
Someone already made something similar. It was basically a box with a PCIexpress slot that then plugged into your laptop via an expresscard I believe. The problem I think was that you could only use mid level cards because of the expresscard slot on laptops being a PCIe x1 bus so the bandwidth was pretty low. However maybe they will make a new one when laptops come out that support expresscard 2.0 which is way faster than 1.0.. in fact expresscard 2.0 details came out this week...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
nxtiak @ Mar 5th 2008 8:31AM
These cards get bigger and bigger. Next thing you know, the video card will be like a power supply. 1 big box that connects to the motherboard via one big cable.
rock99rock @ Mar 5th 2008 9:57AM
So what you're really saying is, i need a new case?
Yubastard @ Mar 5th 2008 10:05AM
true. I second. :)
theohner @ Mar 5th 2008 11:01AM
To the best of my knowledge the PCB is the same size as the 8800 Ultra, it's just much thicker. So much so that I think I wouldn't be able to use any of my SATA ports on my Asus p35 mobo (p5k premium). You already lose 2 if you have an 8800 Ultra, I wonder how many get caught out by this.
BradStar @ Mar 5th 2008 12:09PM
Actually, that's not a bad idea.. then I could just plug it into my laptop as a secondary video boost and have awesome graphics, essentially just using my onboard processor, keyboard and screen and letting the external box do the rest. That way graphics become portable and more affordable.
Sam Winter @ Mar 6th 2008 3:39AM
@Bradstar
Someone already made something similar. It was basically a box with a PCIexpress slot that then plugged into your laptop via an expresscard I believe. The problem I think was that you could only use mid level cards because of the expresscard slot on laptops being a PCIe x1 bus so the bandwidth was pretty low. However maybe they will make a new one when laptops come out that support expresscard 2.0 which is way faster than 1.0.. in fact expresscard 2.0 details came out this week...
http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/08/hands-on-with-the-asus-xg-station-external-gpu/1#c10861196
E71 @ Mar 11th 2008 3:10PM
It's called laziness.
In a rush to advance technology, we seem to throw more RAM at our machines instead of designing something efficient to work smoothly at lower specs.
We throw more fancy cpu/gpu-demanding 3D graphics at our games instead of working on the gameplay/storylines.
But not I... Not I...