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Balance Technology Extended (BTX) Explained
Anonymous Coward writes "The folks over at TweakTown have just posted an article which talks about Balance Technology Extended (BTX) - Intel's upcoming new form factor which will replace the aging ATX form factor standard we've grown used to. BTX is meant to offer better cooling and quiet computing through its smart design."
Who bets this will be the new marketing feature to "power users"? Why don't we just stick with ATX? It's suited us fine for years, computers run too hot these days, maybe we ought to concentrate on stability and quality rather than quantity and TLA's...
I have had many AMD processors overheat, but I have never had any intel do so.
Graphics card on the other hand require some serious cooling adjustments. I don't imagine BTX will really solve the heart of the cooling problem... the video card.
Hmm why should php make more than one pool worth of connections?
I say Intel should take the Dothan design, add SSE3, and make a dual-core processor outta _that_. More processing power than Northwood or Prescott, and half the power consumption.
The BTX standard is emphasizing getting rid of serial and parallel ports and "legacy" hardware.
Given this, I'm wondering if I will still be able to use my full tower ATX case on the BTX boards. I know there are standard BTX cases as well as the smaller form factors. The holes on the "back pannel" previously reserved for the serial ports and PCI cards are sure to give a lot of problems mounting BTX boards if the locations of the ports changes.
Using the standard BTX format (and not the mini-BTX), I have a few questions:
Will I be able to use my case on an ATX board? Will the mounting holes be located in the same location. Will AGP be on the BTX boards (specs I remember seeing emphasize PCI xpress).
It would be a total waste if I (and many others) would need to throw away a good case. I hope AGP will still be on the BTX boards. I want to upgrade within the next year and my ATI 9600 pro would go to waste as well.
There are plenty of ways to get ATX silent.
De-fan components. Heatsinks can be made sufficient for many video cards, chimpsets, and possibly CPUs (I'd bet in an otherwhise well-ventilated case, you could run a Duron at 1500 or so fanless)
Mount hard discs in frames with sound dampening.
Larger fans where fans are required.
Cover holes with filter
BTX won't solve the noise of a CD reader spin up, and it can't keep my fans oiled.
It's just like a fascist dictatorship, without the punctual rail service!
Exactly. So we don't blame the physics exactly because it makes more sense to blame Intel for making design choices that don't reflect real-world priorities.
I've had this sig for three days.
There are some major problems with the BTX Specification. Some things are better than ATX, some are worse...
1) BTX forces you to cool your video card, north bridge, memory, and CPU with the same fan/duct combo. the BTX specification allows ONE 80mm fan to drive the wind tunnel.
This is a major design flaw. There is no possible way on earth that high end systems will be able to use the BTX form factor. Memory is getting hotter every year as clock ramps. North bridges too (not for athlon64, but other platforms it has) Video cards are already putting out more heat than even the hottest CPU's. You just can't push enough air with a single fan to cool all these components running under load unless you are using mid to low end hardware. It just won't happen.
2) BTX doesn't leave room for anything larger than 80mm at the end of the fan duct. This is a MAJOR problem.
This is actually a drawback from the ATX standard, where even the slimmest ATX cases have the physical room to house a 120mm fan in both the front intake, and rear exhaust. This means slower, lower powered fans pushing the same amount of air. This keeps your fans lasting longer, reduce maintenance needs, and reduce overall TCO. In the BTX specification, you are forced to use high speed 80mm fans to keep the system from overheating, even in a midrange setup. You simply cannot cool modern day video cards and northbridges, and memory banks and CPUs with just 1 80mm fan, no matter how efficient the ducting system is.
Suggestions for improvement:
1) Seperate the video card from the BTX wind tunnel. Put it at the bottom of the case, and make it part of its own tunnel. This would allow you to spin the fans dramatically slower and have overall cooler system.
2) Resize the ducting so 120mm fans fit properly. There is nothing worse than an 80mm fan whining in your ear running at 5,000 RPM's when you could have a 120 or 92mm fan running half the speed.
3) Do the same large fan combo for the video card tunnel.
4) Integrate circuitry that monitors temperature of the exhaust air of these 2 compartments. Set reasonable thresholds for this temperature, and have the fans spin up to a higher speed when the temperature rises such that you know that particular compartment is under load. For instance, if you load up Doom3, the video card compartment exhaust will heat up, thus requiring more airflow and thust faster fan spinning. This is not currently available on any standard systems and so far the only consumer systems which ship with microchip controlled fans are apple computers (sadly). No, thermister fans do no good, as they are tuned such that they are always running full speed (even at lowest temperature) or always running low speed (even at highest temperature). you need something which allows the PC Builder to adjust the thresholds.
4) Do away with all chipset mini fans and insted attach very large passive heatsinks. Be sure to make these heatsinks part of the wind tunnel of its repsective compartment.
5)...
6) Profit!
Your ignorance is infinitely greater than you realize.
I think Intel's new form factor is more than a little imbalanced in that it's centred around the CPU. Just when we should be trying to strike a balance between performance and power consumption, Intel's design uses a "thermal module" that looks like it's custom made for a new generation of superhot CPUs like the >100W Prescott.
This is not a good indication of where they're trying to take us. While there will always be performance freaks out there who will demand higher benchmark results even if it means central-heating-in-a-775-pin-socket, there has to be a more sensible middle ground for the rest of us, even if that means slowing down the pace a bit.
AMD seems to have taken a slightly more sensible approach, with its Athlon 64 CPU peaking at less than 90W and implementation of a speed throttling technology they've branded "Cool 'n' Quiet". But it's still a pretty hot CPU at full speed.
What we really need is better middle ground. For a desktop PC at the moment you can choose between very fast and very power hungry Pentium 4s and Athlons, or very cool but very slow VIA C3s or Edens. But there's not much in-between.
Tests have shown that if you underclock/undervolt an Athlon XP, you can retain very good performance while drastically cutting power consumption (to P3 levels and below). Effectively, it's the opposite of overclocking. This setup is ideal for people who desire all the architectural benefits of the latest platforms, but don't quite require the CPU power. But despite this, it's still a very uncommon and unsupported approach.
Instead of recruiting everyone in their race to the top and designing new form factors to cope with the power-hungry CPUs that result, why don't AMD and Intel offer us cheaper CPUs with more sensible power consumption for the mainstream, and give people a genuinely balanced choice? Why can't I buy a nice, cool-running Barton clocked at 1166MHz, or a 2GHz Northwood?
On the other hand, things might get a bit choppy when Joe User tries to run Flight Simulator. So perhaps AMD does have the right approach after all with its Athlon 64: 2GHz when you need it, but a nice cool 800MHz when running web browsers and office programs.
I'm really not buying it as an idea. For one, the ATX could have been morphed into an improved ATX form factor.
Heck, my Compaq workstation IS ATX (actually extended ATX due to mainboard size), but it also has three generalized cooling areas, the card cage (PCI 33/32, PCI 64/66 and AGP), CPU, memory and chipset duct and the drive area, each of these zones have their own appropriate cooling method. The thing has built-in cooling for 15k RPM drives - they are positioned cross-ways in front of the 12cm intake fan on the power supply. Since there is no output fan, the PS fan noise is nicely diffused too.
I thought it was really slick when I looked over the maintainance guides, so I ended up picking one up second hand.
Granted, it's no PowerMac G5 but I actually use more than three PCI cards, and have six drives in my machine, so that case isn't so useful to me.
It's not that they made bad design choices... it's that they didn't abandon them years ago like everyone else did.
I mean really, how many passenger aircraft do you see anymore that are:
a) made of wood and string
b) use some sort of cloth for the wing
c) can actually fly at low (i.e. 10mph in a headwind) speeds?
The whole problem is that Intel is still using the x86 architecture (8 bit) with a bunch of kludges thrown in to make it support a lot of the new functions and ideas we've come up with since the 70s.
Take a gander at those heatsinks. I mean damn, they are just HUGE. There are just realities when dealing with silicon transistors. Intel may have the highest consumption, but the other high performers aren't far behind. You just needs lots of fast transistors to get fast processing, and those give off lots of heat.
Now that's not to say you can't make lower performance, lower power CPUs. Intel does that as well. However people generally want FAST (regardless of if they need it or not), so there is a drive to continue to increase processor speeds. Intel, AMD, IBM, et al are driven by market demand.