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Computex 2005 Early Bird Coverage
zbojnik83 writes "
Today was the official start of this year's Computex, but as always
we were able to get a sneak peak at the show before the floor actually opened. With the show a day barely underway, we've already seen the first AMD BTX motherboard, a number of NVIDIA G70 graphics cards, an Intel motherboard that can be switched to an Socket-939 board by just purchasing a single card and the details of ATI's new multi-GPU chipset."
I miss the good-ol-days when everything used the same socket. It silly stuff like this a non-issue.
Pretty Pictures!
Just think of the smell!
Pretty Pictures!
Since they are geeks, they probably have the latest in personal air filtration technology; this would allow them to inhale the air yet remain unharmed by the stench of sweat and the solvent escaping from freshly opened computer parts.
For those of you interested in the cheap RamDisk tech that Gigabyte is showing off at the show, the SPCR forums have a slight bit more information... http://forums.silentpcreview.com/viewtopic.php?t=2 2448
Here's a quick summary:
SATA Type: Unknown as of yet... Email sent to AnandTech about this topic...
Maximum transfer rate of DDR200: 1600MB/sec
Maximum transfer rate of PCI Bus (not used in this incarnation of the technology): 132MB/sec
In addition, DDR266 and others should slow down to function at DDR200 speed without a problem.
Um, the "ATI's new multi-GPU chipset" link actually points to a slashdot article entitled "AMD Athlon 64 Dual Core Chips Released".
I've read all the docs and specification PDFs that were released when BTX was announced. I still contend that the BTX form factor is unnecessary.
For one, it was designed such to accomodate Intel's excessively power wasteful chips that aren't proving to be worth the power they waste.
For another, most of the changes to accomodate these wasteful chips could have been done as simple tweaks of ATX, call it ATX 3.0. Without having to contend with nearly so much of a change, ATX 3.0 cases could still have housed ATX 2.0 boards. ATX 2.0 case designs would have only needed a few changes to work. Granted, ATX 3 boards might not work so well in ATX 2 cases because the older cases wouldn't have the necessary mount points to take the stress of the extra heatsink weight.
PicoBTX is nice but given the acceptance of the small form factor ATX systems, I don't see how picoBTX is different enough to be more accepted.
Yeah, they are showing the G70 chip and the GeForce 7800.
Since they are geeks, they probably have the latest in personal air filtration technology; this would allow them to inhale the air yet remain unharmed by the stench of sweat and the solvent escaping from freshly opened computer parts.
They do have the latest personal air filtration technology, but they pulled the batteries from them to power up a more important technology that needed the power. (laptop, PDA, cell phone).
I thought the (supposed) advantage of picoBTX was the efficient cooling system that's already part of the spec, which can be easily (and cheaply) implemented by any case maker. The components that need cooling (CPU, chipset, and GPU) are in-line with the BTX airflow and the fan/heatsink/thermal module is part of the CPU.
Quiet small form factor ATX systems tend to have specially designed (and expensive) cooling systems (like Shuttle's ICE heat pipe) and specially designed cases/PSUs. Most of the other SFF ATX systems that have tried to copy Shuttle's success are too noisy or hot. From what I've seen, none of them are cheap.
I thought the hard part of designing a SFF PC (quiet cooling) was already taken care of in the picoBTX spec. Note that Shuttle's picoBTX system is their only XPC that doesn't use their ICE heat pipe. If picoBTX gets more accepted, we should see more inexpensive, tiny, quiet picoBTX systems from a number of case manufacturers. But where the heck are they? Even Intel doesn't offer a picoBTX motherboard yet.
TO START
PRESS ANY KEY
Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...
it must becasue it says "sneak PEAK" instead of "sneak peek"...
Well, things have gotten fast enough now, that changes are smaller and smaller. Not a big reason too. I follow everything, but I haven't seen a product that made me say, "WOW OMFG I HAVE TO BUY THAT YESTERDAY!!!" in a few years. Well, not in the computer field at least. :D
Need some new thinking in the design teams.
When ATX first came out, there were a LOT of problems with the cases and motherboards of the time(Baby AT was the most common) for manufacturers. For those who don't remember the old days, we had:
All connectors were on a seperate back-plate, or you could punch out a cover and mount the serial, parallel, game port, SCSI connectors, and everything else except the keyboard connector. So building a system meant you had to connect every one of these connectors via a small ribbon cable to the motherboard. Today we have the extra USB connectors and firewire connectors, but back then, just about EVERYTHING had to be connected individually.
The power supply had to be hard-wired to the power button on the case. Since the documentation was poor on many of the power supplies and cases, it wasn't unusual to connect the wrong wire to the wrong connection on the power switch and fry the power supply. In most cases, when you bought a case with power supply, the power button would be pre-connected to the power supply, but not always.
You couldn't do a shutdown from within the operating system because the power button was independant of the motherboard. This is minor, but it's nice to be able to have the system shut itself down without needing to wait.
So, what does BTX bring that is so much better than ATX? Better air flow and having expansion cards where the chips are on the other side of the card? That doesn't seem like it would really be worth it if your system isn't overheating. You could also have an improved design in cases for improved air flow without changing from ATX. Cards could also have the chips mounted on the other side of the card. If this violates the ATX standard, but it fits into the motherboards and cases, then what harm has been done? Or let us keep the same motherboards, but adjust where they sit in the case and it still doesn't warrant a change in form factors.