I am pretty sure the fans on most graphics cards blow air into the heatsink, leaving it to exhaust out the side or back of the card, then sucked up by the rear fan. Not much you can do about that but I think it works fine most times unless the computer not designed for a large card like that. There are also blower style graphics cards which use a radial fan to blow air through a duct and out the back of the slot covers, which works better in tight computers, it's pretty common. I think a simple reason for making the card look nicer on the fan side would be that those images are what is mostly shown in product pages where people purchase the cards, so people will buy the better looking one regardless of if they'll see it in their case or not. Most computers don't have a clear panel anyway so the majority of the time the side isn't even seen.

Post edited on 29th Oct 2018, 6:12pm

>>1762
Air movement is more of a non-issue. The larger issues are generally going to be the heatsinks getting gunked up with dust. Make sure to blow out the dust every now and again.

With modern cases, there is plenty of room to prevent air from stagnating and heat up.

The real problem, as can be clearly shown in your image, is the PCIe ports being completely blocked. God forbid you want to use one of the new and fancy SSD drives, or a good quality sound card, or a network card.

Also, with multiple card set ups, you now have to remove everything to get to the card vice being able to lift out the problem card by itself. The cases and motherboards were designed with the vertical mount orientation in mind, both for air flow and ease of use. Changing that on a whim is a stupid idea, unless you *really* need to show off the LEDs on the fans of your graphics card which would be otherwise obstructed by another PCIe card.