Building the Perfect PC

Hardware Design Criteria

With the functional requirements determined, the next step was to establish design criteria for the SFF PC hardware. At left are the relative priorities we assigned for our SFF PC. Your priorities may of course differ.

Our SFF PC configuration is a well-balanced system. Other than expandability and video performance, which are unimportant to us for this system, all of the other criteria are of similar priority. Here’s the breakdown:

Price

Price is moderately important for this system, but value is more so. We won’t try to match the price of mass-market consumer-grade systems, but we won’t spend money needlessly, either. If spending a bit more noticeably improves performance, reliability, or cooling, we won’t begrudge the extra few dollars.

Reliability

Reliability ties for top importance with size. We’ll make compromises in cost, performance, noise level, or any other criterion to make this system as reliable as it is possible to make an SFF PC. The case volume of an SFF PC makes it difficult to achieve reliability comparable to a larger system using similar components, but we’ll do everything possible to build the most reliable system we can within the inherent limits of the small case.

Size

Size is matched in importance only by reliability. If it isn’t small, the whole exercise is rather pointless. Still, we didn’t award this category the absolute highest possible priority, because there are some compromises we simply won’t make. Barebones “shoebox” PCs are available ...