How many heatsinks are there that predominantly dissipate heat on the upper side of the graphics card? The only ones I have seen are the Thermalright V1/V1 Ultra and AeroCool VM-101/102.
It seems like a pretty obvious thing to do, since they take up fewer PCI slots and move heat to where it can be more easily exhausted. They also help keep heat away from precious PCI cards.
The V1 Ultra and VM-102 are arguably the best in their class (active/fanless respectively), so why aren't there more like them?
Heatsinks that transfer heat to the other side.
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i think the biggest reason is because there really hasnt been a need for large or passive heatsinks for vga cards until recently. the whole "quiet" product thing only got going about a year ago in mainstream retail stores, and before that vga cards didnt output nearly as much heat as they do now. So i think it was a combination of cards running cooler and less emphasis on quiet products in the past.
Another big thing is that swapping a heatsink on a vga card is a MUCH bigger difference than swapping a heatsink on a CPU. On a VGA card it will void you warrenty, and is much more labor entensive and entricate to install than a cpu heatsink. Ive seen alot of people that build their own systems that still refuse to do vga heatsink swaps just because they dont want to void their warrenty on it. So theirs alot smaller demand for aftermarket vga heatsinks as there is for aftermarket cpu heatsinks.
Another big thing is that swapping a heatsink on a vga card is a MUCH bigger difference than swapping a heatsink on a CPU. On a VGA card it will void you warrenty, and is much more labor entensive and entricate to install than a cpu heatsink. Ive seen alot of people that build their own systems that still refuse to do vga heatsink swaps just because they dont want to void their warrenty on it. So theirs alot smaller demand for aftermarket vga heatsinks as there is for aftermarket cpu heatsinks.