News GTX 1070 built into Skylake Motherboard

Check out this motherboard which has a GTX 1070 built in, this would be the answer to all our indie SFF case dreams it was sold to the public! But judging from the side mounted USB ports it has been designed to fit into a specific enclosure.

But still, imagine the potential this has for fitting into for example a sub 3 litre case.

The other thing to point out would be the length of the GTX 1070, this custom motherboard looks shorter than a standard ITX, so does that mean that ITX size 1070s are in development?

http://www.overclock3d.net/articles...ke_motherboard_with_a_built_in_gtx_1070_gpu/1

 

[jeshikat]

More info here: https://smallformfactor.net/news/colorfuls-b150-motherboard-integrated-gtx-1070

The board is 170mm wide, so same as Mini-ITX. It even has standoff holes in the same location as Mini-ITX though of course it wouldn't fit in a normal ITX case.

 

[Phuncz]

Interesting board, seemingly specifically built for VR backpacks or atleast very SFF oriented cases. I'd like to see a proposed cooling solution for this that keeps it cool and quiet. Honestly I'd rather have the option to upgrade the GPU than the CPU, since CPUs only last a few years before their socket is changed and generally have had single-digit improvements every generation, whereas GPUs can be upgraded for many years and provide serious boosts in performance.

 

[Josh | NFC]

I'm all about this. I would do a tiny run of ultra high end billet cases with this. I have a design for a similar layout I have been saving. I'm not crazy about the I/O placement, but I could make it work...

 

[TheInternal]

With the increased energy efficiency from the newest batch of intel CPUs and NVIDIA GPUs, I really think we may have hit a tipping point for the proliferation of true desktop quality parts in notebook and SFF enclosures. Lower power = less heat = more mobility / more usable battery life = smaller enclosures.

From what I've been reading, this will be the first time we'll not see "desktop" and "laptop" versions of the top end Geforce chips. They'll all be the same damn silicon from what the rumor mill is implying... and that's friggin awesome. Having to design fewer wafers / GPU variants saves the company money and is an incentive to optimize faster due to higher cross channel demand (with more feedback / more demands due to wider product utilization). Fewer product SKUs to develop cooling solutions for = more competition to make the best coolers for a handful of models, not to mention potential cost savings to both the company and (assuming they aren't greedy bastards) customers.

I also wonder if the, albeit niche, surge in hardware customization that's been showing up in mobile consumer electronics could also lead to more readily interchangeable / upgradable laptops. The Thunderbolt GPU cases for laptops are one way to address the issue, but the next logical step offered by this new generation of GPUs would be in-unit upgrading. Sure, it's been an idea that's been batted around for at least a decade or two, but I'm really wondering if the tech has finally caught up to the idea. If VR continues to rise, the early adapters (who are usually the system builders / trend setters) will demand the same customization they had on their big bulky desktops in their small mobile VR or AR rigs.

These are exciting times, ladies and gents.

 

[iFreilicht]

Hear hear, that's pretty darn awesome. The I/O placement is indeed very strange, but I think having the RJ45 side towards the bottom, buttons to the front and the rest to the back could work decently well.
You could then also route the bottom connectors to the back with custom cabling, but that would probably make the case quite large. Maybe there's a reasonable MOQ where you can get the board with pin headers instead of connectors at the bottom? That'd save a bit of additional space.

 

[Ceros_X]

With they had these while I was building my deployment box!

 

[Josh | NFC]

With they had these while I was building my deployment box!

Yup! But if it makes you feel better I have been chasing boards like these for 6 years now for another company. They rarely ever make it to market, and their MOQs are stupid high. Once we were able to help boost them into production but when it came time to reorder they bailed out.

Basically what I am saying is this is a cool concept car...but we can always dream!

 

[QinX]

Not to reduce the coolness of this product, but technically we are just looking at the Alienware Alpha done right "isher".

 

[CC Ricers]

This is indeed pretty awesome. I think routing some of the cables would help to get around the placement of ports in different directions, though that would make the case a bit larger than it otherwise could be. As @Phuncz said, this is very likely designed for VR rigs.

One thing that may be obvious here is it really confirms the probability of seeing AIB mini ITX sized 1070's from many vendors.

 

[iFreilicht]

Not to reduce the coolness of this product, but technically we are just looking at the Alienware Alpha done right "isher".

Doesn't the Alpha have a theoretically upgradable GPU? Because that's a huge deal in my eyes.

 

[QinX]

Doesn't the Alpha have a theoretically upgradable GPU? Because that's a huge deal in my eyes.

No the Alpha has a solder on GPU like this board, but the CPU is upgradable, although you can't run a high TDP chip like the K series, which the VRM on this board does seem to support.
The concept is exactly the same, however Colorfull is showing of higher TDP parts on theirs, but until we see a product with it concept boards are just concept boards. Even if they make us drool

 

[BirdofPrey]

With HBM, which AMD has started using and Nvidia will too sometime soon, putting the VRAM on the same package as the GPU, I wonder if we might see socketable GPUs and motherboards with GPU sockets in the future.

 

[iFreilicht]

If we get a good standard on this, I'd absolutely love it! But I fear that you'll not only have to decide Intel or AMD but also AMD or nVidia when buying the motherboard because of vendor-specific sockets.

No the Alpha has a solder on GPU like this board, but the CPU is upgradable, although you can't run a high TDP chip like the K series, which the VRM on this board does seem to support.

I see, my fault

 

[Phuncz]

With HBM, which AMD has started using and Nvidia will too sometime soon, putting the VRAM on the same package as the GPU, I wonder if we might see socketable GPUs and motherboards with GPU sockets in the future.

I highly doubt it. Intel has already more than once steered into the direction of selling soldered CPUs for mainstream. Although it has never done this, it would make manufacturing, support, after-sales, logistics and development a lot easier for OEMs which would be the force behind that idea I'd reckon.

And if we take it into account the same issues and characteristics a socketed CPU has to a hypothetical socketed GPU, I'd be extremely amazed. Even the MXM-on-a-card seems too far-fetched at this point. One of the problems is the base board, power and cooling.

The base board would need to accomodate a wide variety of GPUs without offering too many boards or it would be too expensive or too inflexible.
The power is another hurdle: every card has specific power delivery circuitry. If this needs to be generalized, I'd expect coil whine as-standard and massive increase in volume (especially for low power cards).
The cooling would be very difficult since again the different power requirements will need different types of cooling.
And then all the little things like video-out and overclocking would come into play.

It would basically mean the mess we have with a current computer, roughly times two. Because you'd need board A Type 2 with 250W Power for GPU XYZ and need a 250W capable cooling, etc etc.

The only thing I'd see changing is that AMD would integrate HBM with their APUs, but I don't expect this would replace system RAM any time soon.

 

[iFreilicht]

The base board would need to accomodate a wide variety of GPUs without offering too many boards or it would be too expensive or too inflexible.
The power is another hurdle: every card has specific power delivery circuitry. If this needs to be generalized, I'd expect coil whine as-standard and massive increase in volume (especially for low power cards).
The cooling would be very difficult since again the different power requirements will need different types of cooling.
And then all the little things like video-out and overclocking would come into play.

Yeah I don't see MXM taking off either, exactly because of these problems. Socketed GPUs sound nice in theory, and they wouldn't have any of the problems described, but for the high end market you're limiting the multi-GPU solutions to two cards per board instead of four. Additionally, the whole OEM-business on GPUs would be eliminated in one step, motherboards wouldn't support a lot of different PCIe devices anymore, watercooling wouldn't allow you to pack multiple GPUs tighter, the list just goes on and on.

If there's one thing I can see happening it's the ability to route the GPUs graphics output through PCIe to the mainboards outputs, that itself would enable a lot of very interesting case and motherboard designs.

 

[Phuncz]

If there's one thing I can see happening it's the ability to route the GPUs graphics output through PCIe to the mainboards outputs, that itself would enable a lot of very interesting case and motherboard designs.

Yes indeed, this would allow much more flexibility in placement and I believe there already have been examples of this functionality in the past.

 

[iFreilicht]

Yeah nVidia had Optimus and AMD had some technique where you could Crossfire between an APU and a GPU and output from the mainboard. Maybe DirectX12 will bring something like this back?

 

[BirdofPrey]

My understanding is that it's up to the developer to properly program that. Multi GPU doesn't work by default.

 

[iFreilicht]

For games, yes, but as I understood it, some of the basic rendering capabilities can always be used with Windows 10, even if the game doesn't properly support it. Probably not a good idea to base your case design on the assumption that everyone's going to use Win10 in there, though.