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Comment by zwieback | Hacker News Reader

You're right but ignoring cost I'd rather have something that looks like this than a Mac but there's no accounting for taste.

Regarding the PCIe comment: people are already using PCIe over cable as an expansion technology. We use lots of these, for example: http://www.onestopsystems.com/pcie_over_cable_3810.php

Works in a pinch although it's of course not going to have the same performance as a connectorless solution.

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The point is that GPUs need to be physically near CPUs and RAM. You can do all kinds of external PCI expansion, including Thunderbolt cables several meters long, but you'd never attach a GPU to that other end.

People are running GPU's through thunderbolt on Macbook Airs. TB Actually has provisions for doing this, but they are severely underdeveloped.

That's not going to work well. Thunderbolt 2 is 20 Gbit/sec per connection, vs 128Gbit/sec for a 16x PCIe 3.0 slot.

As Wise points out the challenge is the bandwidth. You can run video cards over USB (see DisplayLink) but the update rates suffer from being constrained to 480 megabits/sec. So if you are paying a lot of money for something, you probably want commensurate performance.

ChuckMcM never mentioned cost at all... ChuckMcM explained very concisely why a PC design like this one COULD NOT EXIST

>You're right but ignoring cost I would prefer this over a Mac ... are you retarded?

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