[SFF Network] Should We Pick One Standard?

[confusis]

This is one of a series of mini-rants by your faithful correspondent, John Morrison. These are part of a series focusing on issues in the SFF niche. All content is entirely opinion of John, not of SmallFormFactor.net, and should not be taken as fact.

There has been musings in our community of this form factor or that form factor being better than the others in all situations. M-ITX being preferable over M-STX. SFX is superior to TFX or Flex-ATX power supplies. DisplayPort being better to HDMI. With so much variety on our markets, should we work towards simplifying the SFF world with de-facto standards - say M-ITX, 180mm long GPU, SFX PSU, 2.5" drives only?

Read more here.

 

[ZA Design]

No. I see what you are saying, and it would simplify things greatly, but let me say what I see as one of the raison d'etres of most of the people here:

We are here to break standards, not make them.

By limiting ourselves, we would never see creativity, just the same old, again and again. What if someone incredibly storage use heavy (3.5 drives) and loves to use insane amounts of gpu horsepower? The Ncase M1, or even something micro ATX would be perfect for something like this, but with any standards whatsoever we are constricting the talent of many designers.

Take LukeD's project Orthrus? Would the fact that it is micro ATX remove it from the world of small form factor computing? That would be a waste of talent.

The concept of "small form factor" should be one of space efficiency and clever ideas, rather than raw size and pure specifications.

Hell, if you can make an ATX build with 4 gpus and a ton of 3.5 inch drives all while barely wasting any space, it should be classed as "small form factor". Because, you see, "small form factor" is a concept that is relative to everything else. If it's small for what it contains, it's sff. It isn't a set of guidelines telling you how something should be done, but rather a motivation to fit exactly what you need and nothing that you don't into your next build.

 

[confusis]

Our community is about inclusion, not exclusion. Being open to new ideas, new designs, new options.

My article was all about knocking down the 'one standard for all' idea, not saying we should standardise

 

[ZA Design]

My article was all about knocking down the 'one standard for all' idea, not saying we should standardise

Whoops, my bad...

To be fair, this forum post does sound somewhat pro standardisation...

But hey, at least we have some more arguments against standardisation!!

 

[LocoMoto]

Good read, standardization may make it easier to produce but it limits innovation, some might look at it like working with restrictions and how that can open up to innovation but nay...
What it would do if anything would be limiting cost put into the products just to spend it on ads and brand rep, eventually leading to a point where it would no longer be sustainable.

Within certain areas it would be needed though so as to provide safe and reliable.. repeatable results.

 

[Curlyriff]

Good read, I agree we need to be able to push the boundary. I think however the difference is that we need to push through different standards. Instead we hold onto our older hardware and force companies to hold onto older standards that should now be defunct.

Think about, it has been shown that we can make SFX PSU's that offer enough power for pretty much any system at up to 800Watt. We have shown that we can have 520Watt whilst being passive cooled with just small heat sinks and semi-decent airflow. Now if we got rid of standard ATX and moved to SFX as the new standard then we would start to push the next standard to get it to the next level. It needs the older standards to be pushed out to get to the next standard and that isn't happening.

Think about E-ATX, those boards really aren't needed for home desktops, Mini-ITX, Mini-ATX becoming the normal would push things to change again. It would allow companies to think about it different again. We now know that people want smaller and smaller footprints but with what we have now limits what we are doing because the way we produce elements (manufactures is the "We" here).

Imagine taking the cube shape as the new PCB shape. The size is 8cm x 8cm or similar. The internal of the cube accessed by the clean face/bottom where you connect it to your case & PSU. You place your DIMM slots internal, you place your M.2 internal. You have your sockets to place GPU & CPU chips on the external faces. Ect. I mean that is just an example of how things could change. Take the Mac Pro and although it isn't there yet the principle of the latest Mac Pro really shows some good thinking out the box from the current standards and what could become the next and then once we have got that we move onto the next.

The biggest problem will always be cost of design innovation and so I don't believe it will ever change where it moves forward unless each of these companies decide they need to innovate to increase their profits. At the moment that does not appear to be the case.

 

[zarch]

Think about, it has been shown that we can make SFX PSU's that offer enough power for pretty much any system at up to 800Watt. We have shown that we can have 520Watt whilst being passive cooled with just small heat sinks and semi-decent airflow. Now if we got rid of standard ATX and moved to SFX as the new standard then we would start to push the next standard to get it to the next level. It needs the older standards to be pushed out to get to the next standard and that isn't happening.

^This right here. It really bothers me that some of the most popular, more affordable SFF cases (Cooler Master 130, Fractal Design Nano S, etc) are sized for ATX power supplies. I see it as a massive hindrance to their layouts. And going with a SFF, sitting the PSU anywhere near the GPU's cooling method isn't the best design, either. If the 130 used the exact same layout with an SFX PSU, it would give alot more room for CPU cooling. And the Nano's PSU location is. . .bad.

That said, I think if case manufacturers for anything mATX and smaller would embrace designs for only SFX PSUs, alot better layouts could be explored. Personally, I'm hoping designs like the M1, A4, and Ghose S1 shake up the market enough to inspire more widespread creativity.

 

[Curlyriff]

Am glad to see others are onboard with the principles. I have been working out how to do a smaller Thermaltek P3 for MATX and dual rad build. So far I have only done a quick layout idea and got comparisons to the P3 & P5 in the model (there isn't an existing P3 model so I used the P5 and just scaled to match the dimensions).

However by using the SFX power supply size it has allowed for much thicker rads (54mm thick + push fans) and for it to include 240 + 360mm RAD with xfire GPU in a smaller size than the P3 and I can probably shave some more off it. I mean I could certainly loose another 2cm in both directions using a more traditional 34mm thick rad.

We are currently talking about 424x397x200mm at this time (HxW) which compared to the P3 which comes in at 476x470x221 (without feet as will be wall mounted).

But yeah we can only go smaller by pushing for smaller. Or more custom where people such as Asus, Gigabyte & MSI who produce cards and mobo's start to make custom PCB's with graphics onboard in a different form factor rather than a rectangle.

As much as I dislike what Apple do and the fact they are going to be more standard form factor next year the mac pro dustbin has some very clever design points that instead of being thrown away should be built upon to get others on board.

Case manufactures should start to look to work in partnership with Seasonic and Superflower and build cases where the powersupply is part of the construction. We know even when pushing the envlope on small form factor builds with sli/xfire we are not going to be pushing past 800 watt so target that heavy to cover all builds and why not make a PSU that is only 30/40mm tall built into the PSU shroud as such so it can be 220mm long and however wide the case is and make the base of the case as such.

 

[JosephEK]

I actually do like standards, but I agree that they can have a negative impact on creativity. The way I see it you give up that creative freedom for mass production capabilities and simplification.

There's a saying "Quantity has a quality all its own." I forget who said it, might have been Stalin, but I'm not sure. It makes sense when you think about what the Soviets were able to do with things like the T-34. Not only that, but Simplicity was another trait valued by engineers like Kalashnikov.

These traits allow for easy mass production which makes things cheaper to produce especially with automation on the rise.

Personally I'm surprised we haven't got this yet:

 

[Phuncz]

In my opinion, standards are to make it easier for consumers to enjoy the spoils without needing to know the deeper workings. Like SATA or USB. There are also more flexible (thus complex) standards, like M.2 which should have been industry-facing and not consumer-facing. Although it isn't as clear-cut.

It usually goes the wrong way with standards when they are incorrectly planned or marketed.

 

[XeaLouS]

 

[iFreilicht]

USB

This is a very good counterexample to the article. USB is starting to become "the one" physical interconnect for consumer hardware of any kind, and I believe that is a great thing. Having the ability to connect an eGPU docking station to the same port you normally use for headphones while on the go increases choice a lot.

Specialized standards cannot ever be a one-size-fits-all kind of deal, but in the scope of generalized standards like USB, which abstracts serial interfaces to a point where you can literally use them for anything, convergence to a single one needs to happen. The thing is that most standards are not part of that generalized group. And those that are wouldn't even come to mind when talking about standards at this point, like the x64 architecture.

Then we also have stuff like ATX12V which is the one standard for internal power delivery in PCs and will be for a long time to come, but that also serve as an example that things could be done much better.

Doing non-standard things is important, though. I think in many cases it would be useful if non-standard interfaces/procedures were never standardised, but just well-documented so the best one will become a de-facto standard at some point. The NCASE M1 reservoir measurements have good potential to become a standard for SFF reservoirs, for example, and people (including myself) pushed hard for it to be supported by the Cerberus.

 

[Phuncz]

USB is an awesome standard. I was into computers well before USB saw the light of day and when it was announced, even with it's mere 11 to 54Mbit transfer speeds, the idea of finally having a true universal (serial) bus was amazing. Looking back at the 20 years, I think it's one of the more successful standards that the consumer and professional has had.

It was a little scary when they introduced USB 3.0 with different connectors (luckily backwards compatible) and in my opinion USB 3.1 shouldn't have been released at all and not at this point in time.

 

[jØrd]

Somewhat Apple specific but somewhat relevant i suppose. Average i/o interconnect lifespan, aprox 15 years

 

[VegetableStu]

IMO the thunderbolt arrow should have ended at where USB-C started, if we're strictly talking about physical connectors ._.

 

[cmyk78]

Year removed mark needs to be added on the headphone jack line