Slashdot Mirror
AMD Ships First DTX Form Factor Prototypes
MojoKid writes "When AMD first revealed their plans for the DTX open industry standard, the intent of that early briefing was to explain
AMD's vision for interoperable small form factor systems. Today AMD
provided more details and a specific design example of the DTX small form-factor standard. This HotHardware article showcases a prototype system built on a low power AMD Athlon 64 BE-2350 processor and 690G chipset motherboard with integrated graphics. Maybe the HTPC just took a small step toward platform standardization?"
> "I'm of the opinion that they should go taller and slimmer. I like the size/distribution of the Shuttle SFF. This has a very large footprint for not having a place for a expansion slot graphics solution."
So do like everyone did with the original desktops - turn them on their ends ...
For the first decade, nobody had towers unless they made them themselves ...
Kevin Smith on Prince
I doubt that this will do anything other than fragment the situation.
BTX has been an utter failure, not because there was anything wrong with it, but that there was nothing compelling enough to shift people from ATX.
Personally I'm a *big* fan of the improvements that ATX gave us over AT - Mostly that I'm no longer likely to electrocute myself by touching the live power switch in AT machines. Ouch.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
When are we going to see motherboards which have NO serial ports, parallel ports, keyboard/mouse ports, floppy ports, IDE ports, analog audio output ports, analog video output ports, and all of that other legacy crutf?
All we need is SATA, USB2/Firewire, digital video, and fiber-optic audio. Such a board would be cheaper, faster, smaller, less power hungry, and less complex than today's boards. Once widely adopted, it would make troubleshooting much easier and make components less expensive to produce with better signals.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Nice artcile, too bad that hothardware web site is so poorly designed! They need to tone down all the damn popover and mouse over ads! Makes any thing of value they would have had almost impossible to bear... I just cannot read the article with all this other crap all over the screen.
For those who would like to actualy get some info about DTX and not get drowned in a sea of annoying ads, check out:
The actual DTX standard site
If you had read the article more closely, you'd have come across this passage:
And on the opposite side of the CPU you'll find the system's pair of expansion slots (a mini-DTX board would have only one slot). The design of the motherboard and chassis means only half-height cards can be used, basically because there is no room for a riser. The slots can be any combination of PCI Express or standard PCI slots, however.The pictures show what looks like a PCI-Express and a legacy PCI slot, so you can throw in expansion cards. Half-height ofcourse means that any powerful graphics cards are out. Personally I think I like the Shuttle-style systems better, but for another reason: thermal management. Those cube model SFF's with their well thought out CPU heatpipe cooling integrated with case fan, together with room for fullsize graphic cards and optical drive, just feels like a better thought out design (and looks great, too). Having one, big, slow-moving fan on the back, with vents on the side, is a lot better that a cramped case where CPU heat is drawn in and leaves through a small/noisy powersupply. What I'd personally like would be a case where the optical drive is the laptop form factor, harddrive also (no space reserved for a full 3,5"), and packed in a Shuttle-like casing (a bit smaller). But by then you might as well look at one of those ITX cases.
...would be somthing that will fit in a VESA mount chasis and do full hardware decoding of H.264 and AVC1 from any container file.
Given that a lot of people would want to run somthing like LinuxMCE, having to decode 1080i using a foss decoder would require somthing in the region of an Athalon X2 5000+, which makes housing it in a tiny box and ventilating it properly somwhat troublesome.
In honesty, I'd rather not run an HTPC at all. XBMC was doing it all for me, right up until I got a HD screen and wanted to playback H.264/AVC1. Hopefully the exploit work on the 360 will continue at a rapid pace and we'll see XBMC360 sometime soon, then I can stop all this faffing around finding gfx cards that vsync properly, codecs that playback everything I want to watch without dropping frames and trying to find a frontend for it all that's usable without a kb/m. Would be nice to have somthing that "Just works" again.
I only buy pepper spray that's been tested on anti-vivisectionists.