Up until now, building small form factor (SFF) PCs has been a bit of a nightmare. Nvidia graphics cards just keep getting bigger, meaning you spend your life whipping out your tape measure just to make sure it’ll fit. Well, no more. The company has announced its ‘SFF Enthusiast GeForce’ branding, signifying when GPUs and PC cases meet a certain guideline.
Working with board partners and case manufacturers, Nvidia has created a new standard that helps you find the best graphics card for your compact PC with less hassle. It’s not entirely flawless, as it relies on third-parties to do the legwork. You also won’t see anything less than an RTX 4070 carry the new label for now. That said, it at the very least guarantees anything that does feature the moniker will be plug and play without a headache and should help keep reasonable temperatures without unnecessary constraints.
What is an SFF-Ready Enthusiast GeForce graphics card?
To earn the title of SFF-Ready, graphics cards must be no more than 304mm in length, 50mm in depth to occupy 2.5 slots maximum, and 151mm in height with room for the power cable.
Cases, on the other hand, need to be a bit bigger than those dimensions to give clearance. Nvidia demands the same 50mm depth alongside 312mm length and 154.5mm of space between motherboard or riser PCB and case panel. Some examples include Fractal Design Terra, Corsair 2000D, and Lian Li A4-H20. You can see a list of compatible cases and GPUs here.
This guideline won’t just apply to new graphics cards but retroactively list existing ones that meet the criteria. RTX 4070 and 4070 Super Founders Editions are among the lucky few, as are options from our friends at Gigabyte and MSI.
SFF-Ready also isn’t the be-all and end-all. You can still find bigger graphics cards that take up three slots and probably wiggle it into some compact cases, you’ll just need to do the measuring yourself as the branding won’t be there to help you in those situations.
You’ll start to see SFF-Ready Enthusiast GeForce graphics cards trickling out in June 2024. For more Computex news, check out Nvidia Project G-Assist, which can help you play your games.