Discussion To hell with nVidia's definition of SFF ready. What should be the actual SFF standard?

[SaperPL]

Well if you look at it sensibly it seems to me that standardising card length to motherboards would make sense. That way you can make efficient cases.

So "ITX" cards would be 170mm/2 slot
"micro/ATX" cards would be 244mm/4 slot
and "eATX" cards would be 330mm/7 slot

Why would ITX card be 2 slot and not 1 slot ? :>

The 5090 shows that you can dissipate a lot of heat in a 2 slot card if there's a lot of vent through area, and there's an awesome example of how it can be done cheaper, done by gigabyte:

So in essence, if you squeeze everything upfront, you can have a huge pass-through area after the PCB. 5090 overcomplicates this thing a lot, but I get that they wanted to extract heat both sides.

Anyway 2-slot designs can do enough to tackle mainstream chips up to 250W of reference size and something between 10.5~12" / 267~305mm.
10.5"/267mm is IMO minimum length that makes sense for the card to have a stealth connector on the bottom side of the card that will go around 244mm of ATX/mATX to be hidden by directly going into the grommet pass-through to the back of the case where cable management is done.

Apart from this some standardised ITX sized and low profile ITX sized also make sense, but having mid-range chips is either impossible or loud, but for lower end ones, they are still valid and make much sense.

 

[SaperPL]

To revive this topic a bit - some stuff is happening:





Both Gigabyte and MSI coming out with such designs.

Few things to note that I think are interesting here:

• I spammed most of the vendors with the idea of how such card should look like last year and mostly didn't get any response, but if that was something that encouraged vendors to go this route, aside from ASUS pushing for their proprietary solution, then it means there can be a way to influence the industry. But that's a big IF.
  
  
• We'll have to see the availability of those cards and if nvidia will do something about it, meaning if they'll allow those to happen in reference size etc.
  
  
• note how MSI have added some surface protecting the cable from touching the radiator, assuming that's the purpose - seems like it's doable to handle it some way.