I believe most mining rigs (insofar as setups dedicated to mining alone go) actually have the cards suspended over the motherboard in a rack of some type, with the GPUs attached using a PCIe x16 to PCIe x1 ribbon cable.
As I understand it, it is not a high bandwidth application since while the GPU will be utilized heavily, the actual data throughput is low as the calculations take a significant time as compared to other applications like gaming that require processing a lot of data in real-time in order to render quickly.
Others welcome to correct me if I'm wrong about any of this.