seems right now even "mining" cards are 95% stock video cards, just with no display connectors. everything else is the same except maybe the bios.
i wonder how far a REAL mining card could be stripped down if it didnt need to conform to the pcie spec physically and electrically. only needs a 1x pcie connector, a few pcie power connectors, a GPU, memory and few glue chips and thats it. so it could be much less expensive, fit into smaller (non standard mining only) cases, reach higher rates (tweaked memory and timings and controllers, say 512 bits wide or something [if that can be done i gather memory bus is baked into the gpu, but maybe bank switching or something can be done]). twice the compute power in half the space. would be sweet.
just need someone to step up and order bare gpu dies and go to town.
This seems like a great idea but someone has probably done it before. The difference is that they also probably kept it to themselves. You can imagine how profitable it would be to run those GPUs for themselves while everyone else is stuck with consumer priced GPUs. If they are savvy enough to build their own GPUs they will be savvy enough to build their own mining farms. People have probably done this before and may already be mining and profiting from it. ETH difficulty never ends.