That's be a pretty clever solution. I wonder if any case designers are brave enough to try to pitch that solution. Somewhat fits in the rising popularity of putting your tower on your desk.
> I don't understand why some extra slots have to raise the cost up 10 times
Part is market differentiation, but the other part is that you quickly run out of PCIe lanes to the CPU (especially with Intel, thanks to their market differentiation). If the mainboard manages to use no more PCIe lanes than the CPU supports, everything is simple. Once you add more or bigger PCIe slots, more M2 slots or more USB3 ports, the mainboard has to include a fairly expensive PCIe switch to turn few lanes into more.
I see. A very good point. Thank you. This reminds me about the explanation of why do USB-C docks have separate USB-2 ports: because every USB-3 lane has a separate USB-2 sub-lane and these are left vacant after using USB-3 lanes to connect an SD card reader and a NIC internally.
By the way, about brave horizontal desktop PC designs, note a neighbor comment by c0balt mentions one, to it seems very nice, I would buy one immediately if a traveling salesman would knock my office door offering it without the mental overhead of having to order it and wait.
Funnily enough, I happen to sell these horizontal ATX cases door-to-door! Only thing is, I'm a bit far from your area, and I can't stand travelling more than I need to. You'd help me a ton by helping me schedule my way to you, if you've got a few minutes.
> Somewhat fits in the rising popularity of putting your tower on your desk.
I would never want a PC on my desk again. The fan noise would be annoying as hell. Also, the form factor for modern multi-monitors would make them awkward to have sitting ontop of a box like that.
The modern designs are using silent systems like those from Apple with passive cooling, so you're not going to be using a GPU like those discussed here.
My wife has a modern case with a horizontal motherboard: Thermaltake Core V21. It's not short enough to put a monitor on top of (because it uses a dual-layer design with a "basement" under the motherboard for the PSU and HDDs) rather than being wider, but it does at least solve the GPU leverage issue.
That's be a pretty clever solution. I wonder if any case designers are brave enough to try to pitch that solution. Somewhat fits in the rising popularity of putting your tower on your desk.
> I don't understand why some extra slots have to raise the cost up 10 times
Part is market differentiation, but the other part is that you quickly run out of PCIe lanes to the CPU (especially with Intel, thanks to their market differentiation). If the mainboard manages to use no more PCIe lanes than the CPU supports, everything is simple. Once you add more or bigger PCIe slots, more M2 slots or more USB3 ports, the mainboard has to include a fairly expensive PCIe switch to turn few lanes into more.