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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.
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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.
I don't think that these are really meant to be lain pizza box style on a desk. I had a couple of old Alphas which were similarly shaped, and similarly quite tiny. If you didn't stand them up on their side they would overheat in about 15 minutes, if you stood them on their sides, the lasted about an hour in a small poorly ventilated room.
Small form factor computing, requires a large amount of cooling, the most efficient way is almost invariably to just allow for convection to do most of the work.
The old school desktops of the 80s and early 90s could get away with being horizontal, because they had large metal cases with plenty of air inside. Lacking at least the volume of air, these wouldn't last very long at all without a large airflow.
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.
If you take the screen, battery, keyboard out of my Thinkpad what's left is 9"x7"x0.5". That's 229mm x175mm x13mm. That's just my rough estimate. If you took that form factor and put it in a case that you could open up w/o wrecking it you would have a great standard small formal machine. Mine has 2-USB, 1 S-video, 1-SVGA, 1-LPT, 2-PCCard, 1-DVD, 1-speaker out, 1-mic in, 1-Docking port.
Seems to me that a no screen, no battery, no keyboard 'laptop' form factor in a case you can open combined with a planar you can add things to using the mini-PCI bus or just coupling it through a docking base would be the solution. In fact you could use a dumb coupling through the docking port via a flat cable and build all the expansion electronics and devices into the back of an outboard monitor. Basically you take the PC in the montor design and break it in two so that the basic PC is separate from the expansion bay in the monitor. Keyboard and mouse through a USB port or Bluetooth. With some work you could get the PC to be barely larger than it's own AC power adapter, sans drives.
BTX wasn't a total failure. A lot of the BTX improvements - like what direction air flows through your case - were silently integrated into existing "ATX" machines.
DATABASE WOW WOW
...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.