Video Card Bracket

Frequently Asked Questions About PC Video Card Brackets

Avoid card sagging and stress on your motherboard with a replacement video-card bracket. There are high and low-profile brackets available for nearly all video cards from leading brands like NVIDIA and AMD. You_x001A_ll find a wide selection of new and preowned video card brackets and kits right here on eBay.

A video-card bracket, also known as a graphics card bracket, is a piece of metal that attaches to the video card and is usually found at the side of the card where HDMI, DVI, and other ports are exposed to the user through the back of the case. Graphics cards are often relatively heavy, and without such a bracket, all of the weight would be supported by the motherboard via the PCI-e or another connection. Replacement brackets are available, as are upgraded brackets. A custom GPU fan, for instance, may make a card too heavy for the original bracket, and an upgrade would solve this problem. There are a number of affordable PC video-card-bracket types available, and those include the following:

• High profile or full height
• Low profile or half height
• Single or dual slot

A full-height or high-profile video-card bracket measures 120 millimeters or 4.7 inches, and the card itself will measure 107 millimeters or 4.2 inches. The low-profile or half-height specification is designed for smaller form-factor motherboards and cases. The bracket height is 79.2 millimeters or 3.118 inches, and the card will have a maximum height of 64.41 millimeters or 2.536 inches. Note that a bracket for a dual-slot card will measure twice those sizes since dual-slot cards are essentially two stacked graphics cards.

A video card bracket does have to fit your particular card, but that doesn_x001A_t mean that a particular bracket will only support one card model. Since video cards often share many of the same physical characteristics, both high-profile and low-profile brackets can often support a wide range of card models.

Low-profile bracket kits are designed for video cards that are sold at full height, but they can accommodate a low-profile configuration. You need to remove the original full-height bracket first, and then, you can install the low-profile bracket. Each video-card bracket may have a slightly different procedure, so refer to the manufacturer's instructions for details.