> The cards had some kind of metal cable guide fin on the back
That's to slot into the front PCI brackets for full length cards. There's "full" size for PCI cards and most GPUs are considered "half" length cards. This is separate to Low Profile, so there are four possible slot compatibility configurations, namely HHHL, HHFL, FHFL, and FHHL. Real workstations(including Mac Pro) has slots cut in the case or a bracket to accept the card or that metal piece(which means a standardized solution to GPU sagging had existed even before PCIe was created).
Also, on fans, it's not like blower fans are quieter at all, but in case anyone encounters a situation where turning up fans seem to be only creating noises without moving air or cooling yhe cards, it might be worth remembering that radial fans have higher static pressure and are better at forcing air through.
edit: ps: people recreating this might want to know what case this is. The vast majority of ATX cases, even unnecessarily big ones, only has 7 PCI slots. Cases that can take four dual-slot cards is rare.
I'm not aware of any motherboards, even server boards, that have more then 7 slots. Ditto for rackmount chassis. I'm sure they exist. If any do that are standard [E-]ATX, I'd love a link.
The 4th GPU on the 7th slot occupy the I/O openings 7 and 8. There are few _cases_ with that extra opening to support the quad GPU use case, rare as the ones with the front support cutouts. The case in the article has that slot but model number isn't mentioned, and some people might want to know the make/model of that one.
I'm not aware of an 8-slot ATX board either, but there are custom shaped boards for GPU servers. Also in crypto space - btw I don't understand why those shops with inventories of that certain gold colored NVIDIA crypto cards aren't just shipping the whole complete chassis with appropriate price tags at this point, or just have that chassis listed for estimate/RFQ price. There should be some demands in a single node GLM5.3 box.
You don't need 8 mobo shots: 4 in use, 3 interstitial. {Although my experience with retail mobos is that your only get two x16.)
The case, otoh, sounds like a dremel job
Please don't tell me what I need. Real 8 slots would have saved me from having to bifurcate slot 7 in my 8 GPU AI rig.
Apologies for not being clear - that was the impersonal "you", meaning "people in general". And i think it's correct in the general case, because both ATX and ITX point the extra bulk towards the edge of the mobo.
Why was it not the case for you? Server layout?
I have never seen a server board that offers 8x 16 lane slots. Being stuck with 7 slots means if I want an even 8 GPUs, I'd need to bifurcate one slot into x8 x8, which sacrifices a precious PCIe4 bandwidth.
On the chassis side, not having 8 slots means not supporting 4 GPUs internally, which sucks for certain workstation setups. Being that I actually do have 8x GPUs, I've had to settle for a jank mining rig for a chassis.
wait what? are you saying there are no 8-GPU motherboards period? Not 8 in ATXish form factor? There are plenty of those if you don't mind enterprise prices(or cryptomining reliability and performance if you're going for that)
It's not the pricing that bothers me, it's the inflexibility of using fully-integrated vendors like Dell/HP over custom, vs standards compliant vendors like Supermicro/ASRock. The difference for me lies in the ability to use chassis, power supplies, etc of my choosing, and not have to pay ongoing license fees for access to the BMC.