there's nothing like unboxing a shiny new graphics card but they're just so
bulky why is it that we can't just buy the GPU by itself and Slot it directly
onto our motherboard like we do for CPUs it turns out there are a lot of reasons
that it's just not that simple and a big one is power you see a mid to high end
discrete GPU draws lots of power to the point where it's typically the single
most power hungry component in your system and you can see this if you look
at a graphics card with the cooler removed many of those little components
that you see all over the board are dedicated to power delivery and voltage
regulation which is part of the reason that graphics cards tend to be quite
large putting these components onto the motherboard would not only make it
larger but also significantly more expensive but that's far from the only
logistical concern another big one is memory you see although integrated
Graphics can share your system's standard DDR RAM and some lower end
discrete gpus actually use dedicated but still run-of-the-mill DDR mid and higher
range options use special video RAM called GDDR with the G being for
graphics GDDR is higher bandwidth
because it's designed to handle large chunks of data such as the visual assets
and textures that your GPU is continually asking for by contrast
normal DDR is better at handling smaller
pieces of data so it doesn't have as much bandwidth but its latency is lower
this means that if you were to put a relatively powerful GPU directly onto a
motherboard you would also need to build in dedicated GDDR memory which would you
guessed it make the motherboard even bigger and even more expensive now
hypothetically you could design this video memory or vram to be slotted in
rather than slaughtered directly to the graphics card but this actually has the
possibility of increasing the rate of data errors which is a big part of the
reason that all modern graphics cards use soldered on vram even if you could
solve the memory and power issues though there's another big roadblock that will
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annual little subscription another huge hurdle to having a GPU socket on your
motherboard is the socket itself you know how AMD and Intel CPUs use
completely different socket designs and even within AMD or within Intel you end
up having to upgrade your motherboard ever so often when they decide to change
the pin layout well you would have the same problem
with a GPU socket but arguably worse as
there are now three discrete GPU manufacturers with Intel entering The
Fray and GPU architectures tend to be
updated more frequently and more dramatically than on the CPU side
meaning that motherboards would go out of date much more quickly not to mention
that you'd be locked into one CPU vendor and one GPU vendor every time you bought
a new one none of this even mentions that all those different gpus would
necessitate different amounts of power delivery and vram so you'd either have
the problem where you'd need a stupidly huge lineup of different motherboards
from every manufacturer to accommodate all these different variations or you'd
have to over engineer every motherboard with enough power and memory to support
the entire GPU product stack which might put you in a position where you'd have
to consider selling organs for a motherboard finally there's the reality
that although graphics cards are hot Commodities with Gamers there are many
more people out there that don't need a powerful GPU meaning that motherboards
with GPU sockets on them would be relegated to a very niche market due to
how expensive they'd be giving manufacturers even less of an incentive
to make them so for the time being if you want a GPU on your motherboard it's
probably only going to happen in a laptop or other specialized device on
the desktop it's just so much cheaper and easier for them to continue doing
what they've been doing slotting them into universally compatible inexpensive
PCI Express slots and besides do you
really want to strap another cooler to your motherboard what you really want to
do is subscribe yes the video is over bye-bye