Video cards are too damn big!

Modern video cards are the size of water melons, and about as heavy to boot. This is a problem since they barely fit in cases, and they block access to existing ports, which is a problem that I ran into recently.

I recently upgraded to an RTX 4080, from my 3080, to get some extra frames in Cyberpunk. The upgrade was totally worth it, as running it at the native 5120×1440 my ultrawide monitor supports was causing me issues. Mostly with the GPU running out of VRAM, as that resolution pushes the 10gb my old video card has. 

While worth it, the upgrade presented me with another issue. The new card is so damn big, my 2nd PCI-E x16 slot is completely blocked by the heatsink, which renders my capture card completely useless. But luckily there is a solution to this problem. And luckily for me, my case has vertical slots to side mount cards. 

Enter this little cable; the pci-e riser cable. 

 

For $35 from Amazon, one end pops into the port on the motherboard, and is low profile enough that it can fit under the cinder block sized heatsink. 

Worked like a friggin’ champ.

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