Looking at retailers and it seems they're all clearing out stock of usual length cards and filling up with short versions of the 970 and 960, often with single fan cooling solutions.
I'm guessing there's a nice cut in B.O.M. on these boards, but is cooling performance affected?
Yes, it definitely is affected, as they use a smaller heat sink, half the surface area for heat to be dissipated from - and often will need fans to run louder. These are only really meant for mini-ITX type builds.
I find it odd that short cards are becoming a trend seeing as the majority of the most popular mITX cases (Corsair 250D, BitFenix Prodigy etc.) support 270mm+ cards anyway and it's not like we see cards like the 6990 anymore either.
Maybe it's a Fury X fashion thing? New flagship card is short, let's make some short models to fit in with the market, that kind of thing.
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More likely a chicken and egg situation. The only thing stopping mITX cases getting smaller is the need for a big graphics card. Put the same power in a car the length of the mobo and you can makes some pretty small cases able to boast serious power, especially if you run an SFX power supply and forgo an optical drive.Originally Posted by dotdrew
GPUs are pretty much the only component in the last 10 years that hasn't either significantly shrunk (there's a much bigger range of uATX and ITX motherboards for example,) or most people have switched to being integrated (sound, ethernet,) in the motherboard. The only other one I can think of is RAM, which is pretty small to begin with.
I am not sure about that (the overall situation with small GPUs).
Recently made a gaming ITX using a Haswell i5 and a Gigabyte R9 390 and a non-modular PSU. All in a SG13B-Q case.
No issues with the heat (under load both CPU and the GPU can stay around the 70°C mark).
Haven't tried overclocking the GPU but I would say it's pointless.
Anyway, the point I am making is that if you can have all those components in a small ITX case and don't face throttling with a R9 390, you shouldn't have your cooling affected with a 960/970 at all.
Is there any difference in performance between the short and long versions? I didn't know what the difference was so I ended up going with the longer version to be on the safe side.
Isnt this all to do with old stock?
Nvidia pre 900 series card and current AMD are all power hogs so need better cooling solutions. It's easier for manufacturers to just plonk on what they have instead of designing new up to the point where the differential makes it economic to spend less on cooling.
Has anyone actually seen a review where they properly compare short vs full-size performance, cooling and noise for these cards? I may be looking at an upgrade and am slightly limited by case size so something like a the EVGA 960 mini would suit well, but I'd rather squeeze the smallest full-size card I can find in if it will perform better.
The GTX960 is fine with a short PCB as it has a relatively low TDP - my Gigabyte GTX960 is quite compact and still has a dual fan cooler.
Regarding the GTX970 it looks more like a reduction in production costs,which is interesting - its almost like Nvidia and partners "might" be gearing up for a price-war. I wonder if they know something we don't??
Having a look back at reviews and features, there's a few 970s out there that obviously don't need long PCBs: check out the third picture on http://hexus.net/tech/reviews/graphi...x-970-phoenix/ for a PCB that's at least 33% longer than necessary (that's a lot of empty PCB space to the left!).
I'd guess there's a cost saving element to moving to a smaller card, and also an increase in applicability: you can always put a small card in a big case, whereas you can't put a small card in a small case. As long as the cooling solution is sufficient, I don't really see any great benefit to a longer PCB, and it's unquestionable that more people are being drawn towards small form factors and also pre-built gaming machines. Perhaps with nvidia's performance lead on linux there's a few GPU manufacturers looking to Steam Machines for a short term boost to revenue too...?
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