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Intel's BTX Form Factor Launched Today
Hack Jandy writes "It's been almost three years in the making, but Intel's BTX form factor finally has some retail products to show for itself. Anandtech has some extremely thorough benchmarks of the new technology and proves that BTX definitely shows an improvement over ATX for the same sized chassis. Anand claims BTX as a design win, "It's obvious why Intel waited for Monday morning to lift their BTX platform - they have a winner on their hands.""
So far, it looks interesting. But I'm curious, it it's inteded competition the AMD64 platform boards, or will AMD have it's own version of BTX in the (near) future?
What I'm curious to know is if these guys FINALLY got rid of those god-awful nests of wires that you have to plug into the mobo for power, HDD LED, etc.
God, I hate those things. You either have to spend 15 min. reading the Engrish on the mobo manual to try and figure out which is which, or just cross your fingers and hope for the best.
A molex-type connector (or something along those lines) would make my life a lot easier.
Anyone know?
I've looked at it semi-seriously and most of it seems to be only tweaks on ATX while being intentionally incompatibile. Most of those tweaks can and have been done already, and IMO, BTX is mostly unnecessary.
I personally was slow to accept ATX simply because I had a legacy case and didn't want to upgrade for the sake of an upgrade. Now I have a small number of ATX based computers and I don't see the point of scrapping the entire system, possibly save for the drives, just to go to BTX. I bet most BTX boards will be pretty exclusive to PCIe or only provide a minimum of legacy PCI slots. With existing ATX boards and cases, I can at least keep more of my PCI cards becase most of them don't have PCIe equivalents and they still work.
The problem seems to be the relative CPU and DIMM placement; the standard requires placement of DIMM sockets too far from the processor. With the Athlon 64's integrated memory controller, following the BTX spec becomes very difficult. Of course, BTX is Intel's spec, but it is also a proposed industry standard.
Anybody else think Intel did this on purpose?
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Honestly, though: WTF? That can't be a hard fix. In fact, I'd bet it's downright simple.
I imagine they say it would increase case costs, but really, the increase would be marginal.
I'm seriously getting tired of these guys making new stuff with features 75% of us don't use or care about, and not making simple usability fixes instead.
I am not a big fan of this BTX form factor. Though they only tested the micro size it seems they are trading decibels for degrees. Now that is fine for a media center type of box but what about a gaming machine? Until I see a rig with one of those power hungry video cards running at acceptable temperatures then I may be impressed.
This is similar to the layout of the PowerMac G4 MDD (Mirrored Drive Doors) model. It even has a reflected organization of the expansion slots.
let me get this straight....
intel has introduced a new form factor standard
a) that amd can't follow because their memory controller is integrated into the cpu and the btx standard specifies that the memory must be too far away from the cpu, and in an orientation that would make equal length traces almost impossible
b) whose sole purpose is to provide additional cooling capacity to a processor that ran way hotter than anyone expected, and that intel has now announced will be phased out in favor of the p3 descended pentium-m
and somehow this is a winner? btx will die off with the prescott's. i give it 2 years max.
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
Interesting. I hate to see MORE of the serial and parallel ports disappearing. As a embeeded systems developer, I NEED serial and parallel ports to interface with hardware. I already have a hard time with the one serial port the ATX machines have now. We constantly have to buy add on cards and USB to serial converters. We need a macroBTX form factor for those of us that need all the extras. You would think those guys at Intel would understand.
From the company that brought us the CPU's that could double as toaster ovens, we now have the BTX. Let's see what improvements (ahem!) we can look forward to:
- More heat: Rather than make the CPU run cooler, we'll redesign the motherboard to accommodate. Oh, and the design will *coincidentally* thwart faster processors by making the trace lengths unequal.
- Fewer options: Windows is the dominate OS, so there's no need for more than one or two PCI cards. Who cares if the onboard peripherals don't support Linux - it's not like buyers would add a PCI card or two to improve performance or achieve interoperability...
This board is a non-starter. The PC overtook the Mac because of the fact that it was more customizable (even if it was technically inferior). If people wanted a big company to restrict which hardware they run, they'd buy an Apple.The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Real innovation would be to put the processor on the backside of the mainboard so that the case can be used as a huge heatsink. The graphics card should plug in horizontally, so that it can also use the case for cooling. I'm tired of those noisy power sucking machines. J/
The inside of the BTX case looks very similar to the workstation designs, especially those of SGI. I remember that the Indy workstation didn't have a single fan and was virtually noiseless due to correctly designed air ducts.
PCI Express which is somewhat like SGI's crossbar (PCI Express uses switch instead of bus), AMD's on-CPU memory controllers with NUMA, SATA almost like SCSI, etc. made PC's more and more like workstations. I think that correct thermal design is the last and final thing and BTX is a big step in this direction.
You can defy gravity... for a short time
Am I the only one who thinks it's a bad idea to blow warm air into the user's face?
For a tower model, this would of course not be an issue, but for a desktop model like the one presented in the article. the airflow out of the case might be such that it goes straight into the user's face.