Many good reasons: heat sinks, fans, layout, production technology, and more i guess. But in this case bigger is better It's been at least 6 years since I owned a workstation (for game purposes), even my laptop is running on its 3rd or so year. My memory of installing graphix cards in a self built pc dates back to riva TnT, or was there one before that as well... i believe it was, the name eludes me. Since then there have been a number of ati/nvidia cards, but this gtx 260 is so much bigger (and more powerfull) than any card i've had before; The weight of it surprised me. I made sure to pick hardware wich would do the gtx 260 right. Can't have it running idle, no bottle necks (proof of speed between the ears?). I'll be exploring the CUDA part of the nvidia card soon. Love to have some cpu/memory intensive task runnning on that card. And for the wang; It's a known fact that meter/second is the measure of choice, not meters.