gpu Because why not.

[ZcanKal]

I had a crazy idea, if motherboards have sockets for things like CPU's, RAM, and, of course, graphics cards, but the graphics card is just some RAM and a GPU soldered to what could be described as a "Daughter board."
Have the card manufacturers sell things like fans, coolers, and a blank card with slots for VRAM and a socket for a GPU, you can buy VRAM from Samsung, Corsair, Kingston and such, and buy the GPU from AMD and Nvidia themselves.
Like I said, it was a crazy idea, but it might work.

[Crunchy Dragon]

It's more profitable for card manufacturers to sell the complete product and let the consumers do whatever the heck they want it. It would be an interesting idea, but probably not the best. Also the graphics card PCB is basically a daughter board, no reason to stick that in quotes. There are also VRMs to consider, where would those come from? Would we, the consumers, have to buy those ourselves and put them on the PCB or do they come preinstalled?

[theklax]

It doesn't really make sense to upgrade any of the components on a video card, aside from perhaps a cooler(and by extension fans) which you can already do fairly easily...

I might upgrade my PC RAM because I'm using some RAM intensive applications such as compiling code on a PC that was previously a gaming rig, I can see very few instances where parts such as VRAM would need to be upgraded within the life of a given GPU.  It doesn't make sense to facilitate variance in this regard.

 

The other thing to consider is it would lead to high manufacturing costs, thus more expensive video cards....

 

A good idea until you think about it a bit....