graphic Card memory upgrades

[nothingbetter2do]

wouldnt it be cool if you could add more memory gddr3 to your graphics card....i mean you buy a card with say 512mb gddr3 built in but that it would have at least one spare slot to add more later when you have money to buy more....what do you think....nvidia and ati card makers could make loads of money this way by sell addtional gddr3 memory specific to suit their cards....

 

[prozac26]

They won't.

They would rather have you buy a new card instead. Not to mention memory doesn't have as big of an impact on performance as the actual GPU architecture.

 

[lewbaseball07]

why couldnt graphics cards be its own little daughter board to a mother board....like it had a socket for the gpu and slots for the memory!!

that would be cool!

 

[RomeFanatic]

wouldnt it be cool if you could add more memory gddr3 to your graphics card....i mean you buy a card with say 512mb gddr3 built in but that it would have at least one spare slot to add more later when you have money to buy more....what do you think....nvidia and ati card makers could make loads of money this way by sell addtional gddr3 memory specific to suit their cards....

10-15 years ago there were some graphics cards for which you could buy additional memory. I can think of a few reasons why this practice did not continue:

1) Not enough people bought the memory to make managing the sales channel worth while.

2) Graphics cards tend to be designed to use the cutting-edge memory technologies. The plug interface probably screws up the electrical design, not to mention the added memory would likely not be matched properly with the existing one. If you design the board to account for these factors, you end up with a card that does not compete performance-wise.

3) The cost of the memory would have to be low enough for consumers to prefer buying it over a new GPU. But the memory is probably one of the most expensive components of the video card (since it is cutting-edge and purchased from an external vender). And by the time the consumer is ready to upgrade his memory, there's some hot new GPU technology that they want to buy, instead.

 

[Valtiel]

why couldnt graphics cards be its own little daughter board to a mother board....like it had a socket for the gpu and slots for the memory!!

that would be cool!

No matter how cool it would be, the companies would rather make more money off of you by having you buy an entire card than just letting you upgrade. Also I can already imagine the compatibility issues .

Although it would be pretty cool 8)