Always wondered this. Wouldn't the video card have better support if the orientation was flipped? The weight of the card would be resting on the screw.
Always wondered this. Wouldn't the video card have better support if the orientation was flipped? The weight of the card would be resting on the screw.
8 Comments
They were designed like that many years ago before anyone fathomed that we would be trying to hold up 50 ton, 5 mile long graphics cards with a couple little screws. It’s too late to change the design now that we have decades of parts using this design.
Not that that matters. You should be screwing the card in tightly enough for it to not need to rest on the screw. Friction between the screw and case should hold it, not the side of the screw.
But worst case if it can’t be tightened enough, a two slot GPU will be able to rest on one of the screws because it has two screw holes with one in the middle.
These were designed before towers were a thing. Cases were only horizontal, flat desktop units so it didn’t matter what the orientation was. Really, the issue is we made tower cases upside down/backwards.
modern PCs are a mishmash of ancient and new standards and this kind of thing is the consequence of that
PCI was never meant to hold any expansion card that’s bigger than one slot or longer than the motherboard, and it was designed for horizontal cases
The blanks were designed this way so you can remove one without fully removing the screw.
GPUs have the slot fitting on the top so you can have a screw partially in, and slide the bracket in from below, making it easier to install.
I don’t think anyone does this, though.
I agree from a vertically mounted standpoint it does not logically make much sense, but with the amount of weight even the heaviest GPU is going to exert on it, even a tiny bit of screw torque is just fine to keep it from budging.
https://preview.redd.it/lhqz7uwdp93d1.jpeg?width=1200&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=200da843cb26af62839e833462f7aca1de2f92d1
They were designed when graphics cards looked like this.
The purpose of the bracket is to keep you from shoving your expansion card inside your case when you plug something into it. It’s not there to support the weight of the card itself.
all the answers are wrong. the answer is computers used to be horizontal not vertical. so it didn’t matter if the screw was top or bottom, but top looked more appealing in design. it wasn’t until computers moved to vertical that they never changed the original aspect so the screw seems like its in the wrong place. i would kill for a proper horizontal case like the old days, that would fit say 360mm liquid cooling and the biggest gpu’s and tons of HDD space.