SLI cooling

[timby]

I've a poser for this august crowd to ponder .....

I've noticed that most of the new motherboards are designed to accept SLI. Also, most mid to high end VGA cards run hot. Why is it that motherboard manufacturers don't redesign the boards to accept aftermarket cooled VGA cards?

Case in point ....

My son's system has 2 8800GT's running in SLI. They both run hot. The VGA card closest to the CPU runs hotter because of the heat generated by the CPU and the other VGA card. He was having display problems when running games. We installed an aftermarket cooler and the card is running much cooler however the lower card is now running hot and there is no room to add any additional cooling because of connector spacing. The system has a ton of case fans and we've added more. The card still runs hotter than we would like.

Since SLI is becoming the norm with the option of TRI and Quad SLI, wouldn't it be better is the MB's had a larger footprint in the case and allow more cooler options?

Just a thought ...

Comments welcome

[Darthtanion]

Another way to look at this is to ask why cooling manufacturers do not come up with a slim-line means of cooling these high-end graphics boards. After all, the motherboard manufacturers have to scale their products on an accepted industry standard so they can be used in a regular enclosure. Newer motherboards have a lot more room between the video boards than they used to, so why can't cooling companies come up with something that will suit the needs of the enthusiast?

Just another point of view to consider since asking motherboard companies to move away from standardized specifications is probably a total waste of time.

[timby]

Darth

Their are certain laws of thermodynamics that can only be addressed by surface area unless other more costly methodologies are utilized (Water, Nitrogen). However, if MB manufacturer's would move or remove the PCI slots and layout the PCI-e slots would facilitate the use of more common methodologies (air cooling) for cooling the GPU.

That being said maybe we could include the Graphics card manufacture in the mix and ask them to design more than minimal cooling for the cards.

My point is that with more demand for higher performance in the future, I can only see this problem becoming more serious.

Again, just my 2 cents ....