Balanced Technology eXtended (BTX) Form Factor - The Future of Cases & Motherboards
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 18, 2003 12:34 PM EST- Posted in
- Cases/Cooling/PSUs
Final Words
The first BTX motherboards, cases and power supplies are due out in 2004. The transition to the BTX form factor encompasses much more than a smaller case, with a flipped layout on a motherboard.
The move to BTX will also bring us closer to a fully legacy-free PC, with PS/2, serial and parallel ports already beginning to disappear from prototype motherboards.
With BTX we will also finally receive an industry push towards quieter computing, no longer will you have to purchase a proprietary small form factor system (or a Dell) in order to silence your PC.
Finally with BTX we will see a strong move to embrace technologies like Serial ATA and PCI Express, a transition that will take much less time to come to fruition than similar adaptations we have seen in the past.
For those of you heavily invested in your ATX motherboard and AGP graphics card, there's no reason for panic. It will take quite a while before the death of ATX; and although we've done a lot to get rid of the "beige box" with the latest generation of ATX cases and the advent of small form factor systems, the final nail in the coffin of boring computers will be driven by BTX.
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Atropine - Thursday, September 18, 2003 - link
Intersting changes coming our way, just don't know how well it will be accepted by the PC Enthusiast Community.....from the looks of these comments, not very well!Anonymous User - Thursday, September 18, 2003 - link
DAMN its ugly.Can see the market for case windows dropping substantially
Anonymous User - Thursday, September 18, 2003 - link
#19,Better take another look at that thermal picture. As far as I can tell that is an air intake!
Usually a darker color depicts a lower temperature. Now look at the area surrounding the CPU. Directly above the CPU you can see the color streaking from the heatsink.
Even more telling is the color streaking up from the graphics card.
I also have a bad feeling about heating the computer in this way. But Intel has done this before. In the original ATX specifications the CPU was to be cooled by a passive heatsink, being cooled by the air being blown in through the PSU. To facilitate this the CPU was located directly below the PSU, and the PSU were to be equipped with a fan mounted on the bottom, blowing air down.
In retrospect it doesn't seem like a very good solution, and it never was. The ATX specification was quickly revised, but not before the major OEM manufactures had pumped out many thousand computers with the original configuration.
This BTX standard doesn't appear to be a good design, and it will be interesting to see if it can succeed. I don't think it deserves to, not in it's current incarnation, but I'll reserve the right to change my mind once I get to play with one.
Anonymous User - Thursday, September 18, 2003 - link
"Virtually no computer systems have 'air intake fans'."Put down the crack pipe. Intake fans are pretty common.
Anonymous User - Thursday, September 18, 2003 - link
I'll be mad, too. I've got a box full of Model M keyboards, in case the two I'm using now ever go bad.Best keyboard of all time == IBM Model M.
Anonymous User - Thursday, September 18, 2003 - link
A LOT of people still use parrallel ports for printers. I'm a comp. tech, and I see them ALL the time.The serial ports... they're hardly used at all, but when you need them, you NEED them.
Anonymous User - Thursday, September 18, 2003 - link
I still can't believe noise is that much of a problem to people. Does it really bother people that much when they hear a fan spinning?Icewind - Thursday, September 18, 2003 - link
What the hell is with the changing of position on the open side of the case is beyond me, and I find that new PCI express power requirments a total joke. My gawd, were gonna need 1000W PSU's at this rate. I love case modding and such, but this seems like a joke to me personally, i'll keep my modded Antec 1000AMG "Blue Fantasy" for a long time to come...http://www.3dbistro.com/ftp/icewind/fantasy4.jpg
Anonymous User - Thursday, September 18, 2003 - link
Duh. Geez, get it right. That's *not* an air intake fan by the CPU, that's the exhaust fan. Just take a look at your own thermal picture. The CPU is the last thing to get the cool air, as it should be, otherwise all your components would just be heated up by the CPU. Grade school thermo tells you the way to efficiently cool something like this is to exhaust the hot air, not blow in cool air. Virtually no computer systems have "air intake fans."Anonymous User - Thursday, September 18, 2003 - link
Can u put a BTX and an ATX picture side by side to compare the difference? I'm wondering also if that one picture is backwards