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New BTX Form Factor Announced At IDF
xyote writes "A new motherboard form factor was announced at IDF today. See Google News for various press stories on it (how's that for up to date links?). Also, go here for the actual BTX specs."
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The specs pdf for those whose browser doesn't handle backslashes.
The announcement of a 3.2GHz P4 with 2MB of cache targeted at gamers as reported by The Enquirer is more of an eye opener to me. The price tag will probable live up to the "Extreme" label tho, seems like they are affraid that the Athlon 64 will take away some of their "bleeding edge gotta have it" revenue.
Could read the article because it is slashdotted, but a replacement for atx is really needed.
At the time of introduction, atx was designed for CPUs with a power dissipation of 10-20W. The cpu socket was placed right under the power suply to cool the heatsink with the airflow of the PS fan.
Nowaday, 80W CPUs dont benefit from this closeness to another heatsource in the PC. ATX doesnt include anything that allows thermal coupling between board and case (think of audio amp heathsink) or air-tunnels to cool the cpu with air from outside the case.
Also, eATX boards are quite huge, to big for anything but server cases, but normal atx isnt quite big enough for dual cpu boards with dual channel RAM (or opteron with 4 channel ram).
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
So, I suppose that a motherboard with a fan on the north bridge is just as quiet as one without a fan, right?
Acoustics may not be the best word to use, but it's certainly valid. From Webster's:
http://reptilian.net/BTX_Spec_1_0.pdf
http://web.newsguy.com/nstrom/BTX_Spec_1_0.pdf
You mean like MicroATX, FlexATX, or even MiniITX?
The difference is the above ffs are all somewhat interchangable - you can stick a flexATX board in a full ATX tower with a 700 watt ATX PSU if you wanted to.
This is more like the switch from AT to ATX - new case, new PSU, etc..
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
ecs desknote comes sorta close, you can replace the cpu and ram with regular commodity bits.
http://www.ecs.com.tw/products/a929.htm
Yeah, but windows standby sucks, at least on 9x - probably more than half the time I've had to reboot 9x boxes on standby. And you have to do Start -> Shut Down -> Standby, instead of just tapping a button as you get up to leave. X does it right; fast, stable, and easy. BTW, Classic has supported Sleep since the first PPCs came out. Works OK, at least better than Win..
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
More to the point, that quote was talking about system noise, not motherboard noise (as I read it).
And yes, as mentioned else where, part of the reason for the new form factor is cooling concerns. Between the CPU and GPU on top end systems we're looking at 175+ watts. So we'll avoid things like my Lian-li P50 which is a great case but has the PSU way too close to the motherboard.
This stuff is still alive but now it's called CompactPCI.
ATA100 is most certainly 100 megabytes/sec. Its a 50 MHz clock with a 2 byte wide lane (66 MHz for ATA133). And I believe most drives today can do a sustained write at 30-50 MBytes/sec (reads are even faster).
"The defense of freedom requires the advance of freedom" - George W Bush
I just looked at the nice picture in the pdf and I struck me that it seems that the board is mounted the other way around. Let me explain.
...
The expandable tower (which I'm sure will be 'expandable, making it where you can lt it grow upwards to make more room for optical/hard drives.) seems to be either upside down (someone mention the PSU beeing 'on the bottom' meaning that that image is upside down, and cd rom drives would be on the bottom. I doubt that, so I think we are supposed to be looking 'through' the case, e.g. we are looking through the motherboard. So systems would be 'the other way' around.
One big advantage I can see in that is that PCI and probably PCI-Express cards aren't mounted upside down anymore, e.g. with the chips up again, like back in the ISA days. I can see how that will affect thermal problems, as the old spec makes videocards hard(er) to cool.
Also what I miss is hard drive etc connectors on the layout. The old ATX spec did have recommandations for placement of such connecters, aswell as power connectors. I can imagine the power going between rear pannel and onder those 'bridging' chips, or maybe even squeese it between mem/real panel and the 12V connect going somewhere near the CPU (AMD doesn't use this approach does it? or is it even up to mobo designers to use the 12V rail instead of the allready loaded 5V rail. Then again, only thing nowadays really needing 12V are motors in PC's right?) but what about sata connectors? do they really suggest to have those run all accross the mobo? and floppy? not much squeesing left for that one, so is that gonna be under the cpu so it'll run over the CPU?
Agreed though that if you put a fan in fron (where it says chassis) you do have a nice airflow pathway, not cooling the I/O card slots aswell, but who needs those right? (also they don't get as ot except for video) So all in all it's kinda neat to see a maybe better designed standard. I think AMD boards will go with that standard aswell sooner or later, as it's kinda up to the motherboard designers. Anyway this was my rant : )
P.S. It's kinda strange that they still include the floppy disk, that one should have died a long time ago