why don't they flip agp cards upside down?

[Sharkmeat]

Well it is hard to break old habits.It started out as a desktop computer that set flat on the desktop and all the chips faced up where the fan pulled the heat out the back.Now we have a case tower that lays the chip on it,s side were heat has to do a half loop to go upwards.I guess the companies brains never throught it was worth the money to do a double side switch on the gpu for the video cards.
I mention this subject in a post along time ago when AGP came out on why didn't they change the GPU to the top of the card sence most system where going to the Tower case.Oh well my sheep skin is to old for the young a$$es,I guess they feel inadequate for out side help.

 

[MadRat]

Originally posted by: SeekingTao

Originally posted by: MadRat
You can cool anywhere you want with flat copper sheeting. Want the heatsink on the other side? Simply bridge the heat with a copper plate to go up and over the AGP card then place the cooling on the "top" (which is really the backside) of the AGP card. Simple as that.

It pays to have ties to the sheet metal industry.

Interesting thought there... We have a great sheetmetal shop at the Lab I work at. Maybe I can get a copper plate made up for me. I don't think I'll experiment with my GF4 though. Time to buy a GeForce256, they were some hot puppies.

Copper plating is extremely mallauble and can be hand bent using a good straight edge to fold against, although I recommend a curved bend. (Thermal transfer doesn't seem to work as effectively around straight corners for some reason.) I can vouch that even the thin sheets of copper are effective at conducting heat, plus its actually a common way to cool laptops now - using sheet copper to spread the heat across the base of the laptop's case. You will most certainly want to avoid contact with the PCB by using some sort of insulated spacer for safety sake. Its amazing what you can form out of JB Weld when you want to mold makeshift plastic parts. Maybe JB weld could paint the inside of the copper well enough to prevent electrical conduction? Just some random thoughts.

 

[McCarthy]

Goes back to the ISA/PCI days. ISA cards faced "up" in towers or right in desktop cases. PCI came along and someone noticed they could fit the ISA and PCI slots in such a way as to share one of the case openings, thus offering "4 ISA 4 PCI, 1 Shared" motherboards that worked with normal 7 slot cases.

And so now you know why PCI cards are upside down.

AGP - just replaced the top PCI slot. When AGP cards came out they were like the PCI of the day - no ram sinks, small heatsinks, didn't prevent use of the 1st PCI slot. Also, didn't run all that hot so cooling wasn't a concern. Should it have been? YES. I agree with those asking now and there were certainly people designing cards who knew in a couple years it'd be better to have stuff on top. But for that generation of cards there was no reason to and so they were built upside down as well.

And still are.

So why can't they flip them over now?

Because motherboard manufacturers don't allow room. You might have wondered why I was talking about first generation AGP cards above, well, this is why. Not that the cards then needed to be different, but leaving room above the card on the motherboard needed to be made an AGP spec at the time. It's not. Still isn't. So while your board of the moment may have enough room, your friend's board might have a capacitor sticking out that would contact with a heatsink and prevent installation. Or one card might fit in yours and another wouldn't. On some micro boards they might even run into the cpu hs/f or ram, point is, there's no room reserved for up top parts, and though some cards do offer backside ram now you might notice even some of those don't put ramsinks on the back chips.

What's the solution? Get it as part of the spec. Not bloody likely now. Want your cards facing the right way you better get on the case of the PCI-Express people to make sure they are.

Or turn your computer over.

btw, asked this back in June

--Mc

 

[wizdum]

i dont know what you guys are talking aboout. my gf4 agp faces left. blows towards the back of the case... wait lemme go check ....uhhmm ok i lied. ya youre right. they should just turn them "upside down" so heat rises upwards and maybe put the pci slots "below' the agp.

 

[dpopiz]

mccarthy: about the flipping pci to enable shared pci/isa, I wonder why when they developed agp, they didn't have agp "right side up" just so it could share with a pci slot?

 

[Jhhnn]

AGP was originally an extension of the pci standard, and has already been remarked, heat wasn't much of an issue at the time.

While space was an issue with slot mobos, there's lots of room on modern socket boards, more than enough. And Abit has already tossed out the specs with their OTES line, those cards eat two slots, and are noisy as hell in the process. The first manufacturer to break the spec with a flipped over top of the line design that's truly quiet is going to make a killing.

The idea of using a wrap around copper plate seems like a good idea, until you figure that the cross sectional area of the plate would have to be unrealistically large to carry away the heat at an acceptable rate for today's top of the line cards. Zalman does the job with heat pipes, but breaks the spec anyway- it would be a whole lot more effective and less expensive to just put the hot stuff on the top side of the card, attach a big sink and wimpy fan.... might not even need a fan, given that the sink would be exposed to the wash from the processor hsf...

Board makers could help out a little bit in the meantime by putting the silly cnr or amr slot between the agp and first pci slot, giving the vidfan a little room to breathe- my old msi 6309 is like that, can't understand why more aren't..