Largest GPU for Consumers?

[imsodraven]

I've been looking around to find ridiculous beasts of graphics cards. My friend came over recently and brought his Radeon HD 3870 x2. I was in awe how large and heavy the card was. What other cards out there are ridiculous large/heavy? I'd just like to know for giggles. I was thinking of having like a mini- ITX build and having some monster GPU as a joke. Thanks!

 

[damric]

 

[Alec Mowat]

It's funny how much that card would suck today.

 

[damric]

 

[techgeek]

Funny thing is (or sad because I'm that old), I read that exact article in Maximum PC. Of course it was like an April Fools day joke as there was never any card like that.

In those days I was rocking a PIII 450MHz, GigaByte GA-6BXE, 64MB or RAM, Hercules Riva TNT. In those days that was an awesome system.

Those were the days, you still had some choice in GPU's. You still had 3dFX, Matrox was competing, S3, ATI, nVidia, VIA, and Intel (which had discrete GPU's). Those were great days.

 

[Pondering]

I never found out if I killed my sony vaio Pentium 200 ($4,000) since I never knew to do a CMOS reset after uninstalling the Pentium 200 and installing an evergreen 233 so I ended up tossing that computer a month after upgrading the RAM to 512 MB from 256 MB. It is amazing how those chips didn't need heatsinks.

That led to me buy the falcon northwest with an athlon 700 ($3,600) and 512 MB with 2 dimms. I later found out that my 3rd dimm slot was defective however I didn't understand anything about warranties and stuff back in the day.

I moved on to a Dell 4600 Dimension with a pentium 4 HT 2.4 Ghz and it had the most amazing CPU fan setup that I had ever seen ($700?) The falcon northwest survived since I had learned my lesson with the sony so I gave it away. That desktop still runs and is the only xp machine that I have left to run my hp laserjet 1000.

Got a dimension 9150 with Pentium D 2.8 GHz ($1,000) and learn how hot CPU can run since the heatsink and fan setup for the Pentium D since it is basically a cool. The hard drive died after 5 years. I went to brick and mortar stores since I forgot about online stores and balked at the $150 price tags for a hard drive so I bought a HP desktop with the x4 630 and it came with a monitor ($600) and popped in a EVGA GT 240 however the hard drive died 3 days after warranty ran out so I popped a laptop hard drive that I had lying around.

I was browsing at Staples and noticed that they had a clearance on HP desktops and a $100 off coupon for clearance computers. So I ended up getting an a6-5400k for $150 and an a4-3420 for $100. I thought that my GT 240 was dying (but it turns out that the video card is fine and that it was capacitor degradation in stock HP power supply so that it no longer powered the GT 240 so it reverted back to the onboard graphics) I wanted to get a HD 7770 for my x4 630 machine so I had a to get a cx 430 to power everything.

After installing everything I was concerned about the airflow so I posted http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-2089839/gpu-psu-airflow.html.

 

[imsodraven]

Bump. Still looking for that gem.

 

[Alec Mowat]

Bump. Still looking for that gem.

It really depends on your perspective.

I have an old FX 5950

At the time, it was a beast.

My current card is a monster, too. But older cards just are not that big anymore. Cases are bigger, slots are bigger, motherboards... are the same.

 

[imsodraven]

One last bump in case anyone has some more large cards.

 

[Tradesman1]

Maybe the Asus 7970 Matrix

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814121671

 

[Tradesman1]

After the joke is over, feel free to send me the Matrix 😉

 

[Alec Mowat]

This is a monster, but it's for servers. 12 GB of RAM

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-firepro-s10000-12gb,25083.html

 

[DiddyDidIt]

I've been looking around to find ridiculous beasts of graphics cards. My friend came over recently and brought his Radeon HD 3870 x2. I was in awe how large and heavy the card was. What other cards out there are ridiculous large/heavy? I'd just like to know for giggles. I was thinking of having like a mini- ITX build and having some monster GPU as a joke. Thanks!

Asus Mars 2 or 7990 Powercolor Devil 13
Using 3x8 pin power cables to power dual gpu's and massively size triple slot cooling that looks like it should have made the jump to quad slot cooling. These things will double the weight of your pc and chuck out more heat than the sun.

Also there is the devil 13 r9 295x2 version requiring a massive 1000watt min power supply and 4 x 8 pin gpu power cables. Not sure about the 3 cards but pretty sure the Mars 2 was the heaviest. There is the mar 3 aswell using dual 760's instead of dual gtx 580's but that is only dual slot.

As far as I know these are the largest consumer grade gpu's I have known.