4 ms·

Comparing price to performance in this space might not make much sense as it would seem. One of the (very few) interesting qualities in the A1000 is that it's s

Comparing price to performance in this space might not make much sense as it would seem. One of the (very few) interesting qualities in the A1000 is that it's single slot, low profile, workstation GPU. Intel kept the "powered by the PCIe slot" aspect, but made it dual slot and full height. Needing a "workstation" GPU in a tiny form factor (i.e. not meant to slot and power full sized GPUs) was something one could squeeze on price for, but the only selling point of this is the price.

tizio13 1y ago
I think you might be mistaken on the height of the card, if you look at the ports they are mini-DP on a low profile bracket. The picture also states that it includes both types of brackets.
- zamadatix 1y ago
  Great catch, Serve The Home has a stacked picture of the two cards and they are indeed both low profile https://www.servethehome.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/NVIDIA-RTX-A1000-8GB-atop-Intel-Arc-Pro-B50-2.jpg https://www.servethehome.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/NVID.... If your SFF box/1u server has a 2-thick NIC slot it may well be great for that use case then!
onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago
Theoretically, they should be able to launch something more competitive in that form-factor next year, though, right?
- zamadatix 1y ago
  With this wattage I'm not sure why they went double slot in this generation. Maybe they thought having a few dB more silence was a more unique placement for the card or something. The thickness of a GPU largely comes from the cooler, everything else typically fits under the height of the display connectors, and this GPU could certainly work with a single slot cooler.
derefr 1y ago
I'm still waiting for one of Nvidia/AMD/Intel to realize that if they make an inference-focused Thunderbolt eGPU "appliance" (not just a PCIe card in an eGPU chassis, but a sealed, vertically-integrated board-in-box design), then that would completely free them from design constraints around size/shape/airflow in an ATX chassis. Such an appliance could plug into literally any modern computer — even a laptop or NUC. (And for inference, "running on an eGPU connected via Thunderbolt to a laptop" would actually work quite well; inference doesn't require much CPU, nor have tight latency constraints on the CPU<->GPU path; you mostly just need enough arbitrary-latency RAM<->VRAM DMA bandwidth to stream the model weights.) (And yeah, maybe your workstation doesn't have Thunderbolt, because motherboard vendors are lame — but then you just need a Thunderbolt PCIe card, which is guaranteed to fit more easily into your workstation chassis than a GPU would!)
- robotnikman 1y ago
  GIGABYTE recently did this with their new 'AI' box https://www.gigabyte.com/Graphics-Card/GV-N5090IXEB-32GD https://www.gigabyte.com/Graphics-Card/GV-N5090IXEB-32GD
  - derefr 1y ago
    That misses the "vertically integrated" part. (As does everything else right now, which was my point.) The thing you linked is just a regular Gigabyte-branded 5090 PCIe GPU card (that they produced first, for other purposes; and which does fit into a regular x16 PCIe slot in a standard ATX chassis), put into a (later-designed) custom eGPU enclosure. The eGPU box has some custom cooling [that replaces the card's usual cooling] and a nice little PSU — but this is not any more "designing the card around the idea it'll be used in an enclosure" than what you'd see if an aftermarket eGPU integrator built the same thing. My point was rather that, if an OEM [that produces GPU cards] were to design one of their GPU cards specifically and only to be shipped inside an eGPU enclosure that was designed together with it — then you would probably get higher perf, with better thermals, at a better price(!), than you can get today from just buying standalone peripheral-card GPU (even with the cost of the eGPU enclosure and the rest of its components taken into account!) Where by "designing the card and the enclosure together", that would look like: - the card being this weird nonstandard-form-factor non-card-edged thing that won't fit into an ATX chassis or plug into a PCIe slot — its only means of computer connection would be via its Thunderbolt controller - the eGPU chassis the card ships in, being the only chassis it'll comfortably live in - the card being shaped less like a peripheral card and more like a motherboard, like the ones you see in embedded industrial GPU-SoC [e.g. automotive LiDAR] use-cases — spreading out the hottest components to ensure nothing blocks anything else in the airflow path - the card/board being designed to expose additional water-cooling zones — where these zones would be pointless to expose on a peripheral card, as they'd be e.g. on the back of the card, where the required cooling block would jam up against the next card in the slot-array ...and so on. It's the same logic that explains why those factory-sealed Samsung T-series external NVMe pucks can cost less than the equivalent amount of internal m.2 NVMe. With m.2 NVMe, you're not just forced into a specific form-factor (which may not be electrically or thermally optimal), but you're also constrained to a lowest-common-denominator assumption of deployment environment in terms of cooling — and yet you have to ensure that your chips stay stable in that environment over the long term. Which may require more-expensive chips, longer QC burn-in periods, etc. But when you're shipping an appliance, the engineering tolerances are the tolerances of the board-and-chassis together. If the chassis of your little puck guarantees some level of cooling/heat-sinking, then you can cheap out on chips without increasing the RMA rate. And so on. This can (and often does) result in an overall-cheaper product, despite that product being an entire appliance vs. a bare component!

tizio13 1y ago

I think you might be mistaken on the height of the card, if you look at the ports they are mini-DP on a low profile bracket. The picture also states that it includes both types of brackets.

zamadatix 1y ago
Great catch, Serve The Home has a stacked picture of the two cards and they are indeed both low profile https://www.servethehome.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/NVIDIA-RTX-A1000-8GB-atop-Intel-Arc-Pro-B50-2.jpg https://www.servethehome.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/NVID.... If your SFF box/1u server has a 2-thick NIC slot it may well be great for that use case then!

onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago

Theoretically, they should be able to launch something more competitive in that form-factor next year, though, right?

zamadatix 1y ago
With this wattage I'm not sure why they went double slot in this generation. Maybe they thought having a few dB more silence was a more unique placement for the card or something. The thickness of a GPU largely comes from the cooler, everything else typically fits under the height of the display connectors, and this GPU could certainly work with a single slot cooler.

derefr 1y ago

I'm still waiting for one of Nvidia/AMD/Intel to realize that if they make an inference-focused Thunderbolt eGPU "appliance" (not just a PCIe card in an eGPU chassis, but a sealed, vertically-integrated board-in-box design), then that would completely free them from design constraints around size/shape/airflow in an ATX chassis. Such an appliance could plug into literally any modern computer — even a laptop or NUC. (And for inference, "running on an eGPU connected via Thunderbolt to a laptop" would actually work quite well; inference doesn't require much CPU, nor have tight latency constraints on the CPU<->GPU path; you mostly just need enough arbitrary-latency RAM<->VRAM DMA bandwidth to stream the model weights.) (And yeah, maybe your workstation doesn't have Thunderbolt, because motherboard vendors are lame — but then you just need a Thunderbolt PCIe card, which is guaranteed to fit more easily into your workstation chassis than a GPU would!)

robotnikman 1y ago
GIGABYTE recently did this with their new 'AI' box https://www.gigabyte.com/Graphics-Card/GV-N5090IXEB-32GD https://www.gigabyte.com/Graphics-Card/GV-N5090IXEB-32GD
- derefr 1y ago
  That misses the "vertically integrated" part. (As does everything else right now, which was my point.) The thing you linked is just a regular Gigabyte-branded 5090 PCIe GPU card (that they produced first, for other purposes; and which does fit into a regular x16 PCIe slot in a standard ATX chassis), put into a (later-designed) custom eGPU enclosure. The eGPU box has some custom cooling [that replaces the card's usual cooling] and a nice little PSU — but this is not any more "designing the card around the idea it'll be used in an enclosure" than what you'd see if an aftermarket eGPU integrator built the same thing. My point was rather that, if an OEM [that produces GPU cards] were to design one of their GPU cards specifically and only to be shipped inside an eGPU enclosure that was designed together with it — then you would probably get higher perf, with better thermals, at a better price(!), than you can get today from just buying standalone peripheral-card GPU (even with the cost of the eGPU enclosure and the rest of its components taken into account!) Where by "designing the card and the enclosure together", that would look like: - the card being this weird nonstandard-form-factor non-card-edged thing that won't fit into an ATX chassis or plug into a PCIe slot — its only means of computer connection would be via its Thunderbolt controller - the eGPU chassis the card ships in, being the only chassis it'll comfortably live in - the card being shaped less like a peripheral card and more like a motherboard, like the ones you see in embedded industrial GPU-SoC [e.g. automotive LiDAR] use-cases — spreading out the hottest components to ensure nothing blocks anything else in the airflow path - the card/board being designed to expose additional water-cooling zones — where these zones would be pointless to expose on a peripheral card, as they'd be e.g. on the back of the card, where the required cooling block would jam up against the next card in the slot-array ...and so on. It's the same logic that explains why those factory-sealed Samsung T-series external NVMe pucks can cost less than the equivalent amount of internal m.2 NVMe. With m.2 NVMe, you're not just forced into a specific form-factor (which may not be electrically or thermally optimal), but you're also constrained to a lowest-common-denominator assumption of deployment environment in terms of cooling — and yet you have to ensure that your chips stay stable in that environment over the long term. Which may require more-expensive chips, longer QC burn-in periods, etc. But when you're shipping an appliance, the engineering tolerances are the tolerances of the board-and-chassis together. If the chassis of your little puck guarantees some level of cooling/heat-sinking, then you can cheap out on chips without increasing the RMA rate. And so on. This can (and often does) result in an overall-cheaper product, despite that product being an entire appliance vs. a bare component!