Small Form Factor Case Designer NFC - Telegrams for Guests

Hi, Which PCIe gen 4 riser cables do you recommend ? According to Hardware Canucks and many others there is a big issue with quality of riser cables. It can be anything from no display output, flickering, to burning your house down (NZXT). I've noticed a lot of SFF sff cases are still using gen 3 riser cables, even now in 2021. Will situation get better ? As PCIe gen 4 becoming a new norm it seems riser cable support is seriously lagging behind. Or is it just non issue getting overblown ? 

Hi Tom and Josh, just throwing out the question, what would it take for better mass adoption of smaller form factors (mATX or DTX). I personally am going back to mATX from ATX for preference but wanted to hear how you two would "improve" adoption of SFF.

DEEK

I fit my Merc 319 into a Sliger SM560 by removing the SSD bay in the front lmao. It pokes out about 1mm too long to properly close the front panel, but it works!

Would you create an H1-like tower, or Meshlicious-like tower, that could accommodate a 6800 XT SPEEDSTER MERC319 Big Black Card? I need my BBC to fit in a SFF case.

The Immortal Cameraman

I believe you kinda asked this one last episode - btw, I saved that one for this in case you didn't ask it again :)

Moore's Law Is Dead

If you could flick a switch and have the industry settle on a SFF motherboard size, would that be mini-ITX, mini-DTX or some other size? Why would you want to settle on that size?

Rob Giltrap

Considering more efficient design of RDNA2 cards compared to Ampere do you see RDNA2 taking more market share in small form factor builds? Maybe that same question can apply when comparing rocket lake to zen 3 cause I don't think intel is usable in small form factor anymore.

QuickJumper

One of my pet peeves with SFF cases is that so many of them try to do too many things at once and end up cutting corners on something important like cooling (e.g trying to get a GPU or CPU pull air through a restrictive mesh) or size (think of how many ITX cases could have easily fit mATX systems in them). How do you think trying to make large production run mass produced cases plays into this? Do you think that the rise of more "boutique" SFF case designs is solving that at all?

qhfreddy

Hi Josh, Does it keep you up at night knowing that the perfect SFF case has already been created and will never be improved upon - The KFC PC.

Go-Kart

My first SFF was a shuttle PC with an AMD 64 x2 I loved how compact it was. What innovations are you looking forward to changing the game of SFF? Will new standards like the ATX12VO power supply or thunderbolt make it better or worse?

Hi Josh. You cases first caught my eyes about two years ago and were part of what got me interested in pushing new form factors and designs. I plan to release my first case in June/July of this year and was wondering if you have any advise to pass along for those wishing to get into the market? with VGA/DVI going the way of the dodo is it feasible to design water cooling specific cases around single slot cards?

What do you think would motivate AIBs to make more SFF-designed graphics cards? I've honestly seen some really cool designs before like the 1070 Katana, which was a single-slot card, and am interested in knowing what you think leads AIBs to make niche designs like that.

Shoutout to the Deus Ex Box, would you work with a company like zotac or powercooler for sff highest end card (3080/3090/6800 xt/6900 xt)? Also, do you think nvidia has pushed the market ever so slightly towards smaller cards with their small pcb design on the founders cards + single 12pin?

Mang0 Bandit0

My question centers around APU's as the core of a small form factor build. How far are we from retail APU's being viable for 1440p gaming? Are RDNA 2 IGPU's sufficient or do we need to wait for RDNA 3 or beyond? It seems to me that even overclocked an APU would be more thermally efficient.

B. Fish

I love being a patreon member first off all, I find the topics and guest very interesting as usual but I selfishly need to ask Josh some advice. I am new to SFF builds. I already bought a Lian Li TU-150 case, Ryzen 12 core and a Asus/ ROG x570 DTX board. Since this case doesn't accept a 240/280 AIO. What modding advice would you give, any tips before I cut it up?

Dr Forbin

Hi Tom and Josh, guess I got two questions here: 1) With DDR5 and PCIe 4/5 reducing trace lengths (1 dimm per channel etc), do you think we'll see more mainstream cheaper boards catering to mITX out of cost constraint, or would board vendors just be more selective with PCIe version selection? 2)Do you think we'll ever see the PCIe expansion ports (OCulink) on the ROMED4ID-2T or something similar come to consumers in some fashion?

AC_666__

For Josh, does he think it would be better for SFF designs to try to keep pushing into the direction of less expensive cases that are more widely available like the Cooler Master NR200P? Or do we need more high end boutique options that are more specialized like the Winter Design Winter One for instance that cater to more narrow use cases?

Robojim