A small workshop that was put together with EVGA and innovatek showed to the present crowd a few interesting things including the fact how heavy the graphic card cooler can be.

Intel’s PCIe specification won’t qualify and won’t let you sell a graphic card cooler that is heavier than 480 grams.

EVGA water cooler is some 450 grams heavy which is almost identical weight to Nvidia’s refenrece 8800 GTX cooler. EVGA together with innovated user aluminium for the other side of the water cooler and it use the special plastic cover for that cooler. The final goal was to be inside 450 grams specification. Otherwise you can not sell the graphic card and you can not get the stamp of approval and you can not sell such a product.

Even if some company wanted to make a water cooler entirely made of copper, such a cooler would be three times heavier than the aluminium one and that would definitely go out of the PCIe slot specification, and you would not be able to quality it and sell it to the end users. A G80 GTX copper cooler would weight more than 1000 grams and in extreme case even 1500 grams which would three times over the specs.

So at the end the graphic companies do have some kind of limitations they can not do everything that they want.

I guess we all know a bit more about graphic cards today.