What Will Motherboards and PCIe Be Like without SLI or CrossFire?

First it was AMD in a sharp and clear way, later NVIDIA has been even more emphatic and to top it off the developers do not seem to be for the work. SLI and CrossFire have officially died and this leaves other questions quite interesting to debate, because, what impact will it have on motherboards and their PCIe slots? Will they change the form factor, will it stick, or will there be fewer slots available?

Lisa Su’s statements were quite insightful when asked by CrossFire, NVIDIA made it very clear and manufacturers are already taking action on how they will resize and optimize the new motherboards that will arrive with the new processors as early as 2021.

What Will Motherboards and PCIe Be Like without SLI or CrossFire

Although the RTX 3090 will continue to be the only NVLink card available, the percentage of users who want to SLI with two of these monsters will be a minority compared to all those who are going to be kept on a single GPU.

Will they remove PCIe slot without SLI or CrossFire to justify them?

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Necessity or fashion lead the way for every manufacturer, and now after the death of the two multi-GPU technologies and without any signs of a programming optimized for it, the ATX form factor can see how its dominance is in danger, or maybe not?

Are we really using the remaining PCIe ports? Most users do not use them, they are there for a possible dual configuration or for external cards, be it sound, network or multi M.2 SSD. The problem is that the vast majority of these requirements are solved with PCIe x1 and PCIe x8 are left again for the rest of minority uses.

NVLink

One of the possibilities is that we end up seeing how manufacturers dispense with these PCIe x8 in favor of other ports such as M.2, or that they space directly more to let the hot air not influence the SSDs. But what if the ATX reign comes to an end without the need for PCIe without SLI or CrossFire?

The future could go through the DTX format

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And it is that this format has it all, since it is wide enough to house a good dissipation, enough phases and power VRM, wide sockets and at least two RAM channels, without forgetting a pair of PCIe at least, one x16 and another x1.

Perhaps the segmentation goes by platforms, where it is possible that in HEDT ATX could be the winner as such due to its greater capacity on the side, but perhaps in Mainstream DTX could be chosen. The problem, as always, will be cost / benefit.

And it is that moving the market to another popular format requires that everything be largely committed to it, where also everyone enters to compete. ATX is very popular and Micro ATX is still going strong, but it does not receive enough support from manufacturers and the space saved is not too significant compared to ATX, while DTX is a step between Micro ATX and ITX, more focused on what is necessary without losing benefits.

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So could Micro ATX be the one that takes ATX out of the way? Well, the reality is that the cost savings between ATX and Micro ATX is minimal, since the horizontal dimensions of the plates are maintained and there is hardly a cut in the vertical. The boxes would not have to adapt at all, there would be more vertical space in new models for thicker radiators at the same total chassis height and with it the high performance AIOs could take off.

As we can see, there are options of course, it is not necessary to create a new format in such a case, it would only be necessary to bet on the part of the manufacturers on a model and see how people react, something that with Micro ATX they can already see, but ¿ and with DTX? What will become of the PCIe without SLI or CrossFire?