New Gamer Card Designs?

TomsHardwareUser25

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Mar 3, 2013
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Is there a new habit of giving 150-200 dollar cards looks like that? :
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I thought the hardware industry was sure that shielding a graphics card and pushing the heat through the back was such a good idea. Maybe that's not the case anymore?

Yea, yea. Back in 2006, sure, this was very common to have a chip actually look like a chip. However, that quickly went away, and it's seemingly coming back as I can see. Better heat disposal or what?
 
Uhhh.
Unless you weren't already aware, companies usually make their own custom coolers and sell those off for a profit. More often than not, they're noticeably better than stock coolers (the ones you were talking about; shield a graphics card and pushing the heat through the back - blower cards). Heat spreading throughout the case won't really be a problem when there's less heat to begin with.. Not to mention, your case should have decent airflow to start with.

Edit: Blower cards are still sold, as they are the stock cards. GPU manufacturer (Nvidia and AMD these days) sends the stock card to different OEMS and they slap a sticker on and sell those, a short while after they may decide to make their own custom cooling solution (which is almost always), and even creating a custom PCB of their own. Hopefully this gives you some insight.
 


Yes, that's what I was thinking. The blow-everywhere GPU casings (or lack thereof) tends to take more air in and be quicker at removing the hot air.
Boggles my mind, however, how a gamer card with stock cooler (as that depicted in the picture) can all of a sudden look 'chippy', while earlier releases (speaking a year or two) were encased in a type of plastic with all sorts of patterns, logos and whatnot.

It used to be that the look would compensate for the low quality of the card and the low amount of time it would last, plus in addition the extremely high prices the cards were given. Speaking generally, most cards don't last more than a year.

If you pay enough, however, you might just have a card that'll run games two years into the future. That's not the hardware companies' fault, of course. That's the software companies who deliberately don't optimize their clients for low memory usage but instead spend their programmer's precious time on designing something kids will easily drool over - or something adults who don't play too much will find interesting. Either way, add a year or two to the development of a game and lower-end cards will easily run the game, even in spite of the supposedly 'hefty graphic details' that supposedly are implemented in games.. supposedly, yea.
 

Well, they released consoles.