I recently purchased a new Motherboard, a K9A2 platinum from MSI, to replace an older board that did not handle the Amps my two cards drew.
Although I now only use one GTS 250, the board does have 4 PCIE Slots.
However the widths of many cards dictate that only two could be used with this board. So for anyone getting a new card or board, don’t necessarily expect to be able to pop in four cards – check out all the dimensions first.
On my K9A2 board the PCI-E card centres are about 40mm apart, but the lowest slot is about 15mm from the bottom of the motherboard and 20mm from the bottom of my case, so even a passive slim line gigabyte 8600 would not fit there. My case is a typical 4 bay case, 480mm deep by 410mm high, but with any case there is little space from the bottom of the board to the case floor, unless you install a micro atx board into a full case, and then you are not going to have 4 PCIE slots.
If you had three 8800 GT’s you could physically fit them, but the gap between each would be non-existent. Three 9800 GTX cards would fit and you would even have 4 or 5mm between the cards, but these cards are longer, so you would need an extra long case, or an external hard drive! The same applies to the GTX 260, and many of the top end cards.
Many other cards that I looked at, including my GTS 250 and a 9800 GT, utilise larger heatsink and fan designs, but these limit card usage to two.

Its about time the card manufacturers built cards that fit into the standard boards and cases, and there is no excuse for motherboard designers to stick a card slot 15mm from the bottom of their boards.

Its about time the card manufacturers built cards that fit into the standard boards and cases

There are plenty of them: 8600GT/S, 9600GT, Radeon 36x0, 46x0, 47x0.. can you spot a pattern? ;)

and there is no excuse for motherboard designers to stick a card slot 15mm from the bottom of their boards.

Sure there is: it's a PCIe slot, not a GPU slot. Theoretically you could have single slot raidcontrollers, sound cards.. whatever you want / need. It's jsut that (luckily) there's not much left in a PC which the average person needs and which is not integrated on the motherboard.

And there's a maximum board size dictated by ATX standards. If you try to move the last of 4 PCIe 16x slots upwards you'll inevitably get closer to the other slots, which, as you already pointed out, is a bad idea. Well, fitting 4 GPUs into one PC is challenging in every way. I'd say you either need slow GPUs (which defeats the point of having several of them) or water cooling. Or a large case with 8 slots and no concern for heat and noise ;)

MrS

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Scanning for our furry friends since Jan 2002

If we were all rich, we could get a Tesla S1070 which solves all these space problems.
See:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/product_tesla_s1070_us.html

It would work very well if any of us could afford it.

The Dell Poweredge T105 has a PCIE slot so close to the rear that NO GPU can fit into the case. You would need to saw a hole in the back of the case and then the GPU would poke out about an inch!

Mind you not much else that is standard fits into a Dell system.

Ideally GPU-Cruncher PCs would be put into a separate, cool room. There you could easily put the boards somewhere, without the need for a case. Plenty of cooling and no space issues :)
(none of my current machines looks like this, though)

MrS

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Scanning for our furry friends since Jan 2002