It’s not really an understatement to say that over the years videocards (GPUs) — much like CPU coolers — have become rather chonky. Unfortunately, the PCIe slots they plug into were never designed with multi-kilogram cards in mind. All this extra weight is of course happily affected by gravity.
The problem has gotten to the point that the ASUS ROG Astral RTX 5090 card added a Bosch Sensortec BMI323 inertial measurement unit (IMU) to provide an accelerometer and angular rate (gyroscope) measurements, as reported by [Uniko’s Hardware] (in Chinese, see English [Videocardz] article).
There are so-called anti-sag brackets that provide structural support to the top of the GPU where it isn’t normally secured. But since this card weighs in at over 6 pounds (3 kilograms) for the air cooled model, it appears the bracket wasn’t enough, and active monitoring was necessary.
The software allows you to set a sag angle at which you receive a notification, which would presumably either allow you to turn off the system and readjust the GPU, or be forewarned when it is about to rip itself loose from the PCIe slot and crash to the bottom of the case.
Bonkers that we have gotten to the stage that sensor makes any sense at all, though that is a great way to differentiate your product and could well become the default wanted by anybody that still LAN parties and system integrators that have to ship these monsters pre-built…
I would call it a design flaw if the card, in its standard-conforming mount of the slot(s) and PCI interface, can’t support its own weight in a vertical case. Especially since that’s pretty much the default configuration nowadays. Some case manufacturers have attempted to implement a support structure, but it’s hard to design for when the card lengths are effectively random. Not to mention damaging the PCI socket or even the motherboard substrate itself.
It’s really not that hard to design for because there are defined, standard form factors for PCI-E cards so case manufacturers can build products to suit and provide the support rails for cards to slide into.
Obviously if card manufacturers don’t build cards to the standard “full length” dimensions then it really shouldn’t be too much to ask that they design and supply a bracket that bridges the difference so your super expensive GPU isn’t flexing the BGA chips off the board?
You’ll need an adjustable tower case so the videocard will be horizontal. We’ll call it PISA.
Or just use a vertical mount kit/case. Much better.
This is kinda hilarious, a 3 kilo graphic card. Literal newborn infants weigh less
Time to flip form factors:
Put the GPU on the ATX board and add the CPU via PCIe-slot…
Or better yet, make two ATX boards, one for CPU and one for GPU, that can be joined edge-to-edge. Much more space for giant heatsink towers then.