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This week’s Nvidia RTX 5000 reveal at CES 2025 in Las Vegas was a pretty mixed bag for me. On the one hand, the generational price drop on the new RTX 5070 was an extremely welcome sight, as was the backward compatibility for DLSS 4 across all RTX cards. On the other hand, the RTX 5090 costs 2,000 bucks, and Nvidia’s new Multi Frame Generation tech – while impressive – will be exclusive to next-gen GPUs.

Still, there was one footnote to Nvidia’s slate of CES reveals that really piqued my interest: a renewed commitment to its SFF-Ready scheme. This program has actually been floating around for a while – it was a small part of the Nvidia press presentation I attended at Computex last year – but I hadn’t really paid it much heed up till this point.

Why? Well, as much as I love compact PCs, Nvidia’s SFF (Small Form Factor) program felt a bit half-assed at the time. The scheme determined key specifications for other industry bodies – primarily third-party GPU makers and case manufacturers – to follow, creating a sort of certification that assures users that their chosen graphics card will fit inside whatever compact case they buy.

A set of Nvidia RTX graphics cards next to a compact PC case.

Not all RTX GPUs are created equal – sometimes, smaller is better. (Image credit: Nvidia)

It was a good idea in theory, but there wasn’t much an experienced PC-builder couldn’t reasonably extrapolate – most of the current-gen cards supported were twin-fan RTX 4070 and 4070 Ti models, with a small handful of third-party 4080 cards. The only supported first-party FE (Founders Edition) cards from Nvidia were the 4070 and 4070 Super – if you ever saw an RTX 4090 FE in person, you’d understand perfectly that there was zero chance that ultra-chunky GPU would fit inside an SFF case.


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