Guest Editorial – SFF Friendly Graphics Card Design

This guest editorial has been written by forum member and vendor SaperPL!
All opinions in this article are that of the author, and not necessarily those of SFF Network or the team.
In context of external power connector placement
Foreword
This is a lengthy article because the problem that I’m trying to explain in it is a bit convoluted. 
The point of the article is to start a discussion around the card designs in context of both SFF builds and mainstream ATX builds together, for the sake of eventual new design coming out of such discussions being noticed by industry professionals, to be able to gain enough adoption to survive long-term on the market.
Riding the tide
In the PC components market, we rarely see interest from component manufacturers in changing or reinventing the form factor of a specific component type while still making the part compliant with the rest of the PC components ecosystem.
Usually...

Continue reading...

 

[confusis]

Fantastic writeup @SaperPL !!

 

[milesvw]

I wouldn't be sad to see some different options. Although I have found the low profile 180° connectors to be working fine for me. I slip a Zip tie around the board connector between the rows of pins and over the connector. Very low profile. If needed they could be made with PCB designed for easy soldering of cables.

Would it be horrible if one good solution was using 90° headers (oriented like a motherboard ATX)? Seeing as you have the thickness of the heatsink anyway, let the connecter occupy that space.

Ideally a new spec is adopted be being backward compatible. If the uptake happens the market follows.

 

[SaperPL]

Although I have found the low profile 180° connectors to be working fine for me. I slip a Zip tie around the board connector between the rows of pins and over the connector. Very low profile.

Well the point is that we still have to take into account that added space for a cable and it should be doable to design it in a way that you can utilise exactly the space for the GPU to the fullest and not figure out if it fits or not based on the connector location. We can figure out fitting most of the time, but note that if we want smaller cases, reducing wasted space is one way to do this.

Also standardising of specific card form factors could allow more cases like these:

https://smallformfactor.net/news/forfun02-pro-build-video-absolutely-stunning-case-design/

https://smallformfactor.net/news/xi...8l-chassis-around-asuss-proart-gpus-the-ff04/