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Comment by qwerty456127 | Hacker News Reader

Back in the days when I was a kid tower PCs were comparably rare and most of the PCs used the horizontal desktop design which essentially is the same like a tower but put on its side. People would often put the monitor on top of it to save the desk space (see the Windows 95-2000 "my computer" icon). Isn't it time for that to return so we wouldn't need “GPU Support Sticks”?

By the way, what actually dissatisfies me is the majority of mainboards having too few PCIex slots. Whenever I buy a PC I want a great extensible future-proof mainboard + very basic everything incl. a cheap graphics card so I can upgrade different parts the moments I feel like . Unfortunately such many-slot maininboards seem to all target the luxury gamer/miner segment and be many times more expensive than ordinary ones. I don't understand why some extra slots have to raise the cost up 10 times.

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> horizontal desktop design

That's be a pretty clever solution. I wonder if any case designers are brave enough to try to pitch that solution. Somewhat fits in the rising popularity of putting your tower on your desk.

> I don't understand why some extra slots have to raise the cost up 10 times

Part is market differentiation, but the other part is that you quickly run out of PCIe lanes to the CPU (especially with Intel, thanks to their market differentiation). If the mainboard manages to use no more PCIe lanes than the CPU supports, everything is simple. Once you add more or bigger PCIe slots, more M2 slots or more USB3 ports, the mainboard has to include a fairly expensive PCIe switch to turn few lanes into more.

I see. A very good point. Thank you. This reminds me about the explanation of why do USB-C docks have separate USB-2 ports: because every USB-3 lane has a separate USB-2 sub-lane and these are left vacant after using USB-3 lanes to connect an SD card reader and a NIC internally.

By the way, about brave horizontal desktop PC designs, note a neighbor comment by c0balt mentions one, to it seems very nice, I would buy one immediately if a traveling salesman would knock my office door offering it without the mental overhead of having to order it and wait.

Funnily enough, I happen to sell these horizontal ATX cases door-to-door! Only thing is, I'm a bit far from your area, and I can't stand travelling more than I need to. You'd help me a ton by helping me schedule my way to you, if you've got a few minutes.

My wife has a modern case with a horizontal motherboard: Thermaltake Core V21. It's not short enough to put a monitor on top of (because it uses a dual-layer design with a "basement" under the motherboard for the PSU and HDDs) rather than being wider, but it does at least solve the GPU leverage issue.

> Somewhat fits in the rising popularity of putting your tower on your desk.

I would never want a PC on my desk again. The fan noise would be annoying as hell. Also, the form factor for modern multi-monitors would make them awkward to have sitting ontop of a box like that.

The modern designs are using silent systems like those from Apple with passive cooling, so you're not going to be using a GPU like those discussed here.

Another useful feature of the horizontal desktop design is that putting the monitor on the case brings it closer to a comfortable viewing level.

The problem with cases that are oriented horizontally is they're usually required to be in a slim form factor in comparison to "normal" ATX or even mini ATX cases. This poses a problem for providing adequate cooling and power delivery. In face of GPUs (NVIDIA/ AMD) becoming more power hungry/ heat producing this just doesn't work out for most people. There were some attempts in the past[0] however they don't appear to have gained mainstream adoption. On the other hand, systems with low power components could be accomdated in this form factor but they most likely wouldn't benefit much from it (or just employ a laptop with a dock).

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRBJ2fysc64

Horizontal form factor might solve the 'at rest' problem, but the moment you pick up the case to move it somewhere (even still while horizontal) the socket it going to be under load. We really need a solution that supports the card well enough that it's safe even in transit.

Because they usually have to use a different more expensive chipset and a lot of stuff uses PCIE these days that didnt before, for example NVME SSDs now take PCIE slots that were free to be used for different stuff before. And in the desktop market, most people just dont need more than a pcie slot for their boot drive and their GPU. Add to that that PCIE 4 and 5 are more expensive and require more expensive boards.

What exactly do you want to expand it with though? Sound cards are dead and everything besides accelerators is USB now.

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