PowerColor Says Graphics Cards Are Too Heavy
Never break your precious graphics cards again.
With high-end graphics cards putting on weight, PowerColor says that cases and motherboards simply don't provide enough support for these hardware behemoths. A particularly vulnerable area is the rear of the card, away from the relative strength of the case backplate.
The company claims that a PCIe slot can only take so much, before it snaps and interrupts your 16AA Crysis 2 experience. The graphics card vendor will release what it calls the PowerJack, a retractable brace that can be used to prop up ultra-heavy graphics cards.
Weighing only 30 grams, the PowerJack supports loads of up to a kilo-and-a-half. It can extend from its 61.25mm height up to 150mm. PowerColor will start bundling the PowerJack with its heavier cards (no specific yet) this July 15, and sell the accessory separately a few "weeks" after for $9.99.
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It's a good idea... but only for a single card. The other cards in a multi-card setup will still be unsupported. This particular approach could give rise to better CPU cooler support.
I was thinking about how to support the other cards, however if you're lacking space in your case - and you certainly will be if you've got a 58XX or 4XX card, in particular - then any sort of horizontal support to connect to the drive bays, for example, may be unfeasible. An alternative would be a much larger version of what PowerColor have made, in the form of an adjustable bracket that could be secured in the space between the side of the case and the add-in cards, with various supports placed below each card. Of course, this would also have to be placed according to where the card fans are, but at least then you could support all of them. It may obscure any side case fan, however. The alternative to that would be using the PowerColor device for the bottom card, and smaller versions between the cards, though I'm dubious about using the supports on bare PCBs.
Don't go stealing my ideas, now.
Fantastic idea, so simple and something that has crossed my mind more than once.
see now i just tie a lace to the top of my case and then to the end of the gfx card (there's almost always something to anchor to) and that works well.
I had that idea, but I didn't type it. Damn it!
Y'know being a computer nut means,to me at least, finding my own solutions to problems,like, lightly tying down the 2/6 pin aux connectors at the back of my video card to the cross bar upon which the psu sits or salvaging older psu fans and reusing them as exhaust fans in various applications....
Personally I find that water tubing provides all the support my GPUs need :-)
Also I'm not convinced that the vertical mount of the motherboard in majority of modern (tower) cases is ideal - from a physics POV...
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Not avaivable in the uk yet and what about users who have inverted cases. Good idea but needs refining