Yes, I think this computer on a PCIe-card is ridiculous.
But I think NUCs are ridiculous too: small mostly for sake of being small because Intel's marketing team wants to show it off.
People
do want to expand their storage (it always fills up sooner or later) and people
do want to do casual gaming, and they do find the need to upgrade their memory. It is just that all PC users are not "hardcore gamerz" with the latest and greatest powerful and expensive hardware. I think that is a trend that needs to go a way. It's not 1997 any more, when you needed the latest graphics card to even do OpenGL. Game devs should concentrate on the
gameplay not on photo-realism ... The best-selling PC games of all time do have relatively modest hardware requirements.
I used to have an EeeBox as my main PC. It was slim and vertical, with ports at the front at a very reasonable height above the desk: just high enough to get above the usual desk clutter. Most of its weight was in its wide foot, which was needed only to make it hold the cables jutting out of its back without toppling. I had got this particular model because it had NVidia graphics, which made light gaming possible.
I think the ideal for a typical desktop PC would be a box in a size somewhere in-between the size a mITX system and a NUC: more like a bounding box of my old EeeBox with foot or like the PowerMac G4 "Cube" — but that's still a relatively large size interval. Not optimised for size but designed in a smart way for versatility.
ATX and its subset mITX are just crap. There have been a few attempts at interesting form factors somewhere there but none has taken off:
BTX was smart in that the CPU and its heat sink were situated directly behind a fan that was also an intake fan.
The heat sink was directly on the CPU, not somewhere else connected with heatpipes or water-pipes to clear the clutter of components around it like ATX and its subset mITX. BTX machines tended to be only a
little bit smaller than ATX machines. Unfortunately, BTX didn't take off only because the industry had invested too much in ATX.
STX has a motherboard size of 14×14, and there have been a few with several NVMe on the back side and place for MXM GPU on an extension but the layout has otherwise been the same as for ATX, just more cramped. Very little selection of cases and motherboards, but standard desktop CPUs (low-profile cooler only), SODIMMs and NVMe SSDs.
There have also been a few similar to the Mac Pro "ashtray"/"trashcan", with a single fan in vertical form factor, relying on hot air's tendency to rise. All have been expensive custom designs. There was the Mac Pro itself, and then the MSI Vortex, both with a triangular cross-section in a cylindrical or near-cylindrical case: the Mac Pro with a shared heat sink in the middle and the Vortex with heat sinks around the sides.
Then there was a smaller "Gigabyte BRIX Gaming UHD" which was a bit too optimised for size, with a square cross-section and the logic boards on the diagonal inside to use that space to its fullest. Then there are a few vertically oriented mITX cases, but several of these have needed to put the I/O ports at the top.
The MXM GPUs are not a replacement for PCIe, because MXM was never designed to be replaceable - only to allow system makers to provide different configurations at the factory. The motherboard BIOS needs to contain explicit support for the MXM module...
The PIO form factor is like mITX but has the port on the opposite side, facing sideways so that an expansion card is facing the same direction as the components on the board. There are few such boards, and I think most have been for industrial computers. These can be slim, in a "console-sized" layout. The MSI Trident 3 gaming PC has this layout, but I think the motherboard is custom.
you can even put watercooling in [mini-ITX cases]
In many mITX cases, an AIO watercooler is not an
even but a
have to because the layout is so cramped and airflow around the CPU is bad.
It is first when you go with 2×140 or 3×120 radiators that you would see better cooling than with a boxy air cooler, but mITX cases don't tend to support such radiator sizes.
A MUCH better option would be to move the ram to the back as I previously mentioned
The latest Mac Pro is built like that. The CPU cooler is directly on the CPU directly behind the air intake (like BTX). The CPU is closely surrounded by banks of RAM like on a server motherboard — except that the RAM sticks are on the opposite side of the PCB where they are out of the way of the CPU's heat sink.
then put the rear IO on the backplane (lower plate). This way you aren't having to pay to replace those every time you upgrade the cpu.
Interesting...
I think that in general, a motherboard standard should have the components that need cooling on one side, and the components that don't on the other so that the latter don't get in the way.
Maybe the
case for such a standard should be providing the cooling solution, with the cooling designed especially for the layout of that particular case. Heat sinks could max out the available space inside the case, and with fans at the "walls" of the case like BTX.
A somewhat larger case with more expansion might best be designed with airflow from front to back, but a smaller case could have semi-passive vertical airflow. In either type of case, the I/O panel should be at the back. If the I/O panel is on a separate board then the orientation of the motherboard could be independent of the placement of the I/O ports: the design of the I/O backplane configuration would not be fixed in stone, but be part of the case design.