The world's biggest video card

Jokes about absurdly large graphics cards are among the few image-archive entries that stopped being jokes. For most of the period these pictures circulated, an add-in card was a single-slot board with a small fan, and the humour came from imagining one that needed its own chassis. That imagined card is roughly what a high-end consumer part now looks like: triple slots, a support bracket to stop it sagging, and a cooler longer than some cases are deep.

What drove it was thermal, not marketing. Power went up, the heat had to go somewhere, and quiet cooling needs surface area. The practical consequence for a buyer is unchanged: measure the case before ordering, and check clearance against the drive cage. This entry is kept as an archive record.