Other What I look forward to in SFF PC.

JosephEK

Cable-Tie Ninja
Original poster
Mar 6, 2017
175
84
I've been holding out moving to SFF for ages. I've been using a mid tower with an i5 3450 from 2012 paired with an RX 460 4gb from 2016 I've got a fairly small desk and I want to have a system for basic gaming and entertainment mounted to the vesa holes on the back of my monitor.

The first thing I'm waiting for is for systems to start using DDR5 sometime in 2020 and hopefully no later than 2021. There's been recent news indicating that dual channel memory bandwidth for DDR5 5200 would be up to 82.4GB/s vs the 51.2GB/s moden DDR4 3200. So that would be a welcome improvement to those looking to build a SFF system with an APU, especially for AMD because the zen cores love that fast memory.
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/280709-hynix-demos-first-16gb-ddr5-5200-dimms

And on the topic of APUs AMD's been touting the improved density of the 7nm process. I mean they've already gone up to 32 cores on the 12nm HEDT. What's next? What kind of a monster APU could we have coming down the pipe for 7nm? Would they squeeze even more cores? 6 core or 8 core APUs? More GPU cores?

AMD has just completely reignited my interest in SFF with this gen of APUs after this niche has been stagnant for quite some time, but I'm not done holding out just yet. There is one last point I have, but it's more of a question. I don't actually know what kind of chassis are out there suitable for housing an ITX system with a wraith stealth cooler on the vesa mounts of my monitor. Does anybody have any suggestions? It's no hurry though because these are long term plans.
 

Phuncz

Lord of the Boards
SFFn Staff
May 9, 2015
5,835
4,906
I'm looking forward to PCIe 4.0 to increase SSD performance another notch. I'm also seeing more and more SFF barebones workstations meaning the market is opening up to SFF for performance computers.