You thought the RTX cards were big.

[Synn]

Not sure if this is the correct section but i was helping my parents look through their storage locker and i found this gem.

 

Behold the ATI Radeon HD 5870. I love old video cards but was all this really necessary for a 1GB GDDR5 Card? xD
Dell Latitude for scale lmao.

[Fasauceome]

2 minutes ago, Synn said:

was all this really necessary for a 1GB GDDR5 Card?

here's what 1 gigabyte looks like spread out over the PCB

 

You can see how the entire PCB really is going to good use. Also, that card really isn't even that big, that's about as close to "standard" as graphics cards get. Only 280mm long.

[thevictor390]

That is huge for its day, sadly modern cards are still bigger even Radeons... just ask my 7900XT

[SpookyCitrus]

At the time these cards were massive. Still compared to my 4090 or really any 4080 or higher tier 3 fan RTX card, even this thing is tiny.

[jaslion]

Its really not that big tho.

 

Also yes it is needed if you look at the pcb its very very well utilized also the cooler needed to be quite strong.

 

1gb seems dukb today but in 2009 thats like a 16gb 4080 from now.

 

Today I see 2060's larger than this thing probably have one or 2 somewhere.

[Levent]

You thought thats big?

Spoiler

RTX3070 Noctua - GTX970 Strix

Inside of an AP201.

 

THANK FUCK priorities have changed since HD5870.

[Eigenvektor]

Here's a rough comparison to a 4090 FE using their dimensions to draw a diagram on draw.io:

Spoiler

Red is obviously ATI, green is Nvidia

[TVwazhere]

My RTX 4000 series STRIX card (357mm long) compared to my GF's 5L mITX case

 

[Poinkachu]

17 minutes ago, TVwazhere said:

My RTX 4000 series STRIX card (357mm long) compared to my GF's 5L mITX case

 

Wow. At current rate, soon enough you'll be able to build a PC inside an RTX x090 enclosure.

[8tg]

Here are the 3 biggest cards I have

A Gigabyte Windforce 3070ti, 8gb

An ASL GTX 780 King Kong, 3gb

And a Colorful Kudan GTX 560ti, 1gb

what’s crazy is the 3070ti is only 320mm long, which is still 37mm shorter than the strix 4090

but that history’s comically long GPU, the Hd 7990, a dual GPU triple fan card, is only 305mm

[8tg]

Also colorful is responsible for some of the physically largest gpus with their batshit insane Kudan concepts, the ones that don’t go to market.

The Kudan 680 ended up with the same cooler as my 560ti, but they had a few concepts, including this:

 

Which is a passively cooled GTX 680 overclocked to the moon, that requires a secondary heatsink attached to it via a heatsink bridge. 
Around this time colorful was doing weird stuff with add-on heatsinks like this, my Kudan 560ti actually would’ve had some attachable heatsinks as well but I don’t own those.

This made that 680 concept a 7 slot wide GPU, 295mm long, and would weigh around 8lbs. This is heavier than the 4090 strix for reference, by 2.5lbs.

 

They also had a concept for a theoretically infinite length 780ti that involved adding modular fan and heatsink assemblies to the end of the card:

each fan and heatsink section could link together, meaning you could have that already insane 320mm long 780ti with 3 fans

Or you could add another 100mm

and another 100mm

and another

and just keep going until the coolers are no longer doing anything, or just keep going because it would be funny to have a 1 meter long, 9 fan gpu 

[Bagzie]

1 hour ago, 8tg said:

Also colorful is responsible for some of the physically largest gpus with their batshit insane Kudan concepts, the ones that don’t go to market.

The Kudan 680 ended up with the same cooler as my 560ti, but they had a few concepts, including this:

 

Which is a passively cooled GTX 680 overclocked to the moon, that requires a secondary heatsink attached to it via a heatsink bridge. 
Around this time colorful was doing weird stuff with add-on heatsinks like this, my Kudan 560ti actually would’ve had some attachable heatsinks as well but I don’t own those.

This made that 680 concept a 7 slot wide GPU, 295mm long, and would weigh around 8lbs. This is heavier than the 4090 strix for reference, by 2.5lbs.

 

They also had a concept for a theoretically infinite length 780ti that involved adding modular fan and heatsink assemblies to the end of the card:

each fan and heatsink section could link together, meaning you could have that already insane 320mm long 780ti with 3 fans

Or you could add another 100mm

and another 100mm

and another

and just keep going until the coolers are no longer doing anything, or just keep going because it would be funny to have a 1 meter long, 9 fan gpu 

I suspect the secondary heatsink on the top image is allready doing nothing to be fair.....that's a long way for the heat to travel.