Comment by ascar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ascar | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised this isn't mentioned here more clearly: Some high end cases like the be quiet silent base I'm using have the option to mount the graphics card vertically, basically parallel to the mainboard, in a separate anchor slot. It needs an additional connector cable (~$20), but other than that is easy to setup, looks better with a look-in case (the illuminated fans face the glass side) and the weight pulls on a special anchor point just for that with no electronics involved. Plus the card itself is more sturdy in that orientation and there is no issues with bending through its own weight. It might even be beneficial ventilation-wise as the graphics card no longer causes a horizontal divide (basically creating separate ventilation-zones on the top and bottom of the card).

Yes, the cable will add approximately ~0.3ns of additional latency due to the added 10cm of distance.

This is how it looks like:

https://www.hardware-journal.de/images/Bilder/2018/test/be-q...

https://www.hardware-journal.de/images/Bilder/2018/test/be-q...

These 4-slot cards won't fit in most vertical mounts, and if they do the fans might be pressed up against the side panel. But that's definitely a good route to go, now that case manufacturers know what they're dealing with.

Or simply use a case which has the ports at the top, so both motherboard and graphics card are vertically oriented, but still plugged in normally. Case fans are at the bottom and push air up out the back slots at the top.

Example: Silver Stone Fortress case https://bjorn3d.com/2010/05/silverstone-fortress-series-ft02...

I like my mini-ITX case (Phanteks Shift Air 2) because it hangs the GPU from the top and it's sitting behind a mesh so it still has ample access to fresh air.

https://www.kitguru.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/2-Still-8...

I'm getting a Cloudflare error page on that link: 'The owner of this website does not allow hotlinking to that resource'

Huh, didn't realise it spits out that kind of an error. I guess Cloudflare whitelists your IP address if you visit it once since that links still works for me without visiting the original URL?

Anyways, you can see the photo here: https://www.kitguru.net/components/leo-waldock/phanteks-evol...

Yep, it's probably the deep linking protection. It probably doesn't like the HN referer

I could open the link in a private/incognito window.

Same here

Wow, this is almost exactly as I wanted (except I wanted a horizontal mount akin to blade servers). Never seen it, thanks.

This is a helpful post because I have exactly that case and no idea what that slot was for!

It's a fantastic case.

I was going to say much the same. Vertical mount is a game changer.

Whilst this example is a bit on the extreme side:

https://uk.thermaltake.com/the-tower-900.html

It does have some nice properties, no GFX card sag, any water cooling leaks can't drop on expensive components, power supply is back and away too.

Most important point is the cables out the top are covered by a shield so you don't have the ugliness.

How does latency impact rendering etc?

PCI latency has no impact on rendering, but your card/motherboard may fallback to PCIE3 instead of using PCIE4, in which case filling the cards entire VRAM from RAM could take an extra half-second (slowing the loading of new textures an infinitesimal amount).

Modern engines also do a lot of streaming data to VRAM, rather than loading everything up front. So it’s not necessarily a single delay and could very well impact framerates etc.

Is there anything out now, or even on horizon, that's materially impacted at running at PCIe 3.0 rather than PCIe 4.0 rates? I can't think of much.

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