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interchangable gpu and memory chips

Caporegime
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
33,188
Mobo's have 5-10's the space for routing signals, its the PCB thats difficult to make and the pcb that has to fit in pretty much a max of two expansions slots in size and fit a cooler on top. Making memory changable, would increase height of the memory, same with the gpu because both would need sockets.

Likewise gpu's aren't really customisable as much as CPU's. A cpu is generally dual channel, you can put whatever you want in each slot size wise. GPU's have massively more bandwidth, they need 10-12memory chips all connected in essentially 12 channel memory, they only make gddr5 memory in 2 sizes afaik and the capacity is pretty much determined by how many chips a gpu can support.

A 480gtx can't use 1GB memory, it can use 768 or 1.5Gb, nothing inbetween. Theres not much choice to customise it and a 5870gpu would not work on a pcb for a 5450, and vice versa.

It just doesn't work, the closest you get is some MXM packages for laptops but thats basically the whole lot in a tiny little pcb anyway.

A 5870, that was upgradable to the next gen, or a 5450 pcb that could be upgraded to a 5870 gpu, would cost so much more, it would make it pointless.
 
Soldato
Joined
28 May 2007
Posts
18,200
A while back Gigabyte ( I think ) built a card with a pair of MXM slots that took a pair of geforce go cards but it never caught on. One problem is you would never get all the GPU builders to agree on a standard.
 
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