Will Graphics Cards Begin To Get Smaller As HBM Becomes More Mainstream?

[MatthewScott]

Hello,

Just want to ask a question and see what other people's opinions are.

We have seen that HBM usage in AMD's Fury X meant that AMD could make a much smaller GPU (Although I know it's watercooled, which adds to the amount of space it takes up) that can compete with the larger full sized GPU's.

Do you think this will be a trend that takes off with the next few generations of graphics cards, or do you think manufacturers are still going to go for the more typically full size that we see today and use the extra space for better cooling and over clocking capabilities etc? What do you think?

 

[Metalauxilia]

I'm guessing we will see a mix there will be the bigger cards for people who would like to overclock and then smaller ones for people who want to pack a lot of power into their smaller home entertainment type pc.

 

[Gingerbread]

Don't think they will go for small factor GPUs any time soon. As long as the ATX standard stands, with ATX tower cases, it is just cheaper to make bigger and more powerful cards, while we saw that the R9 Nano performs extremely well it provided the close performance to the R9 fury for $150 premium, yet generated more heat. So as long as the whole form factor stands, there would be no reason to go for smaller cards and I don't see sizes going down on the most powerful units in the near future.

 

[Dunlop0078]

I think GPU manufactures could decrease the size of their cards quite a bit and i think the AMD and nvidia reference cards will be smaller with HBM. However im sure the vendors evga, sapphire, msi,etc will still make the large performance card with the massive cooler even if they don't have too (cause bigger is better right?) while also offering a much smaller version which is pretty much what they do now and I doubt that's going to change I mean look at the sapphire fury it does not need to be that big but it is.

 

[MatthewScott]

I think one thing to consider is you can already get a lot of ITX cases right now that can still hold the longer sized GPU's, while remaining small enough to make them convenient for people that need to move their PC around often. In my opinion, they don't necessarily need to get any smaller. Not sure if I worded that well enough for it to make sense to other people but that's my outlook on it. If you wanted something super small you'd get one of those small Steam machine things.

 

[rstoledo]

We gotta remember that there are different levels of users, although we can say that most enthusiast will love to have their full tower and loop appear, some people may just want something small that looks good on some chassis, the manufacturers have given a nice view into ITX size cases that are a bit longer in order to get those "huge" GPU's on it but it would be awesome for some people to get it even smaller, while not getting the temperatures too high. Recall that someone that is willing to go ITX, may not be willing to OC any of the parts, as others will try to WC everything on the small case to get every bit of performance out of it.

 

[MatthewScott]

We gotta remember that there are different levels of users, although we can say that most enthusiast will love to have their full tower and loop appear, some people may just want something small that looks good on some chassis, the manufacturers have given a nice view into ITX size cases that are a bit longer in order to get those "huge" GPU's on it but it would be awesome for some people to get it even smaller, while not getting the temperatures too high. Recall that someone that is willing to go ITX, may not be willing to OC any of the parts, as others will try to WC everything on the small case to get every bit of performance out of it.

I'm seriously considering going mITX very soon. And I'm noticing a lot of the cases have enough room for full sized GPU's. Looking at the NCASE M1 v5 myself

 

[RobCrezz]

Yeah cards will becomes smaller. as with HBM taking up less room on the card than DDR5, also the cards are getting more power efficent, so the components for power delivery can be fewer.

 

[renz496]

It depends really. Take 960 for example. The gpu core is quite power efficient and making gpu with small pcb is possible (look at asus 960 strix). But other gpu vendor can still find reason to fill the PCB with a lot of stuff which end up making those card very big and long (gigabyte 960 G1 gaming). I see not much difference with HBM. Just look at Fury non X from board partner. They still look like regular gpu we always seecwith extracstuff being packed on the pcb and much larger cooler. And talking about cooler if you look at it closely sometimes it is the cooler size that make the card bulky. Fury X while being small physically i do think that AIO cooler actually make the whole package as 'bulky'. They can make the card as small as they want to but cooling the card still pose quite a challenge.

 

[RobCrezz]

Well yeah, but the Fury sucks a bunch of power and therfore heat, hence them making the huge air coolers.