Gaming Discussions

[bbstar]

I personally have a ATX case back in the 90's to millennium, and the graphic card is thin and not too big.  Quite spacious when putting into.

But now I am building a new fast computer, with mATX case.  I realize if i put a new radeon card in, there is not much space left and not even i want to try cross-fire to maximum the power.

Does anyone also feel the same?  I hope to more small card but bigger power.

[jamesc359]

Without a doubt graphics cards have gotten larger. It's unlikely that we'll see them get any larger since there's only so far you can bend the ATX specs before breaking them. There's no way we're going back though, if you want power you have to dissipate the resulting heat somehow.

If you really need a smaller card, the RX550 and RX560 come in significantly smaller variants. Obviously that comes with a noticeable performance trade off. In terms of performance you'd be better off if you stuck with a single larger card.

[red5]

Unfortunately, sometimes the card is only larger to facilitate mounting a big unnecessary fan shroud to make it look pretty. I have some XFX 460 4GB cards that suffer from that problem and make it hard to fit them into some of my LAN gaming PCs. It isn't the PCB or cooler, it's the big honking shroud.

[jamesc359]

While the fancier aspects of a shroud is a little superfluous, the basic purpose of it is to control airflow over the heat sink and various components. A lot of a video card's components might not have a heat sink, but they do still need a directed airflow for proper cooling.