Fans of small form factors PCs will be delighted with today’s announcement of Nvidia SFF-Ready, a new graphics card and PC case compatibility certification program designed to make it easy to know which cards and cases can coexist.
The new Nvidia certification affects both the best PC cases and the best graphics cards of the world, with only certain sizes of case and card being eligible for the stamp of approval.
The new system is remarkably simple. It simply states that if a graphics card is smaller than 304mm long, 151mm tall, and 50mm (2.5slots) wide, it is small enough. Meanwhile, the dimensions for cases are a little larger, with enough room needed for cables and airflow around the card; a case must allow 312 x 154.5 x 50mm of clearance to qualify.
The SFF-Ready program only applies to conventional air-cooled cards with water-cooled cards or those with integrated AIO coolers having too large a range of requirements for such a program to make sense for them.
Nvidia has already listed a load of cards that conform to the standard, with unsurprisingly there being few truly top tier cards making the list. There’s just one Asus ProArt RTX 4080 Super variant that’s small enough, with all other GPUs being RTX 4070 Ti Super or lower performance.
On the case side, the likes of Fractal‘s popular Ridge and Terra cases make the grade along with the Phanteks Evolv XT. Meanwhile, dozens of other card and case manufacturers are signed up to the program.
Nvidia hasn’t yet provided a link to a list of its own that shows compatible cards and cases – as it has down with DLSS compatible games, for instance – but manufacturers will now doubt waste no time making sure their qualifying products show the new SFF-Ready badge loud and proud.
For more of the latest news on small form factor computers, check out our mini PCs stories.