Gordon Thinks SFF Sucks! Does GamersNexus??

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#sff #pc #debate

[gippygames]

RIP Gordon. This was a classic video. It got a little ominous near the end as he made a joke about his time left with us. So for Gordon's sake, don't spend extra time agonizing over small form factor builds.

[ratherbedealingarms]

I love SFF, but I'm not crazy -- I would never cram a productivity rig into a 10L case, but I don't understand why someone needs a 30L case and ATX motherboard when all they will end up using is a single PCIe slot and a couple of M.2 sockets/SATA ports. I'm convinced that 50% of decorative RGB fans are purchased simply to help fill up cases.

[GamersNexus]

09:10 is the best. hahaha, really fun video. Love this. Thanks for letting me join!

[StasRyadinsky]

RIP Gordon. As much as I like SFF builds, he's got a good point. It's not worth it as our time is limited and you could be spending more money and time trying to build a SFF pc.

[Cellbuster]

Cooling becomes more of an issue when you start getting into <10L cases. You can still have good thermals below that, but you start having to come up with your own solutions to achieve that. Coolling is less of an issue than cost.

[Yusuf_K]

Small Form Factor is amazing, but ITX boards and SFX PSU’s are so much more expensive.

[alexmac]

I love my tiny pc, I'm done having a 2001 Space oddessy Monolith pc under my desk getting in the way. Its now ON my desk looking amazing yet understated, reserved, small.

[gogolander]

I’ve got a 6900x and a 6800xt in a meshilicious: though my system doesn’t have any thermal issue, at all, I think Gordon is right: itx are way easier to get thermally wrong, plus the platform could be more limited in features. But they are really cool performance-dense little beasts… ps: I think Gordon is not considering dual chamber SFF cases

[turi-ffic]

Steve led me to some content gold. Thank you Steve

[InfinityPCs]

Rest in peace, Gordon. Heaven better not have SFF pcs

[SirSethery]

I have SFF because
1 - I like how it looks on my desk, and it doesn’t take a lot of space
2 - Makes it easy to bring into the living room for VR
3 - I can’t stand looking at all the wasted space inside a full tower anymore (Tying back to the first point) unless it has something like a full custom loop
4 - My S4M keeps me from spending more money on parts that I don’t need (I’ll never need more than 6/8 cores, and my 3060 ti is more than enough for me. That ~200W mark is usually where price/performance is really good).

My thermals are great, and it’s very quiet on my desk compared to some extremely whiny full towers I’ve had. I do have to undervolt to keep those temps and noise levels in check, but only as low as it’ll go while keeping stock performance.

[yamilabugattas]

Great video! You should invite Steve and Ian for a future episode!

[scottbutler]

I think Gordon has a point, although he's being intentionally confrontational in making it. SFF is like RGB, you go for it because you want to not because it fills a need. If you want something with great cooling, that's way easier to build and maintain in a full-size case. If you want something small and portable, a laptop is way easier to handle than a SFF desktop + peripherals. The main reason to build a SFF system is because you just want a SFF system, because you think they're cool or they look good or you enjoy the challenge or you want to save desk space or whatever. That's the whole point of building your own PC, is to put something together that's customized to your taste.

[masterdftw]

When you can take a full tower PC with the best hardware and put it into an ITX case. The full tower becomes useless imo.

[keyboard_g]

Giant cases that are 85% empty space are also dumb. We don't stack giant spinning rust disks and CDRom drives in there anymore.

[PeakKissShot]

As a college student sff is great since I can move around easier, but once I get my own place I'll return to ATX.

[tomstech]

This is like a console fan telling you why PC's how would they know?
Last I checked a SFX psu at 1000w was plenty even for a 12900KissmyasS and 3090.
Cooling is simply how much air goes in/out per second.
The size of the case doesn't matter, if its a big sealed black box with hot components inside....it's an oven.
If its a 1Ft Square box with 1x 140mm fan in the front and another at the back, That's moving say 30cfm air per minute at 800rpm (so that its quiet) that means the entire box worth of air is being replaced every 2 seconds.
If you have a big 900D case you need allot of fans to fully ventilate the case and prevent recirculation within it's volume.

Edit: I have a raijintek metis with a 3950x cooled by a dark rock pro 4, Gigabyte B550i aorus pro, 32GB of ram and a TitanV, I have 2x 2TB sata SSD's for mass storage, 2x 1TB NVME for boot and games.
Do tell me Gordon why I would need a bigger case just to hold more air.
I also have a 750D with 4x GTX480's and an FX8350 and a 1600T2 psu, I know a thing or 2 about thermals.

[Argonisgema]

literally almost went off the video when the PCworld logo came up XD

[stratcaster]

SFF has huge thermal and component choice constraints for sure. The reason why I went with SFF is (1) limited space and (2) being a student, once I graduate, I'd like to take my PC away with me in a traveling case to wherever I might end up next.
And also I think SFF represents a cool philosophy. Components nowadays scale up power disproportionately with performance. On my laptop, I can underclock my CPU from a 45W power package to 22W while only losing at most 10% FPS in the game that I play most often. Even for big desktop GPUs, with proper undervolting, you can get similar performance at significantly reduced power consumption, therefore heat and noise as well.
To me, sacrificing 10% FPS for >20% reduced power consumption and a much quieter system feels more like a win than increasing the 10% FPS which I cannot perceive in games.

[l.i.archer]

I just finished building an SFF gaming PC in a Cooler Master RC-130-KKN1-Elite case, with a Ryzen 9 5900X on an ASUS Rog Strix B550-I Gaming mobo, a PowerColor Fighter RX 6700 XT, a full-size blu-ray optical drive, an SFX EVGA Supernova 850W 80+ Gold PSU, 32 GB RAM, a Corsair H60 AIO upgraded with a Phanteks T30x120 fan, and two Arctic PST 120mm Slim case fans on aftermarket fan mounting brackets (I had to tap some new mounting holes to the case frame). All inside a Cooler Master RC-130-KKN1-Elite mini-ITX case. I ran Cinebench R23 for 10 minutes and the CPU temperature never went above 66*C, with a multi-core score of 19, 829 points.

I offset undervolted the CPU by 0.1v, and capped the overclock frequency at 4000 Mhz. Normal CPU temperatures average 42*C doing normal computer tasks, but reaches 52*C playing Halo Infinite with the GPU reaching 72*C (after I played with the fan curve). It sucks that Halo Infinite is such a crappily designed game that it pushed temperatures to 98*C before I ended the game to tweak the fan setting (and it didn't even happen in a match, but while waiting to find a match!). I've had this PC running for over 48 hours now with no issues whatsoever.

Love my little SFF build.