RTX 4090 connectors burning up

ATX as a whole needs a look-over with GPUs becoming as big as they have been, and the low-hanging fruit for quality of life improvements.

A couple of things I wish the standard would steal from Apple’s cheese grater Mac Pro tower design for example:

  • RAM and SSD slots are on the backside of the motherboard, so you can swap sticks out or upgrade without removing coolers or cards
  • Its PCI-E slots use a latching mechanism that is accessible regardless of the size of the cards installed, so you don’t need to do the fun “poke the tab with a screwdriver/skewer/etc” dance

Case compatibility would be impacted yes, but I think it’d be worth it to make a major revision to ATX that includes several of these QoL affordances.

2 Likes