Intel's Long Awaited BTX Form Factor

Final Thoughts

Instead of an overnight switch akin to what we saw from Intel during the transition from 865 to 915, the move from ATX to BTX will be more of a slow gentle transition.  We saw some exciting things in the AOpen/Intel combination today; smaller power supply, no dead heat spots (places in the case that air hangs around with no where to go) and smaller design.  Although there are certainly advantages in BTX, no one would realistically expect Intel to force the new form factor down our throats.  As Anand mentioned several months ago, "Switching CPU sockets is one thing, but force people to buy all new cases, power supplies and motherboards and you're bound to get some negative response."  In the lab, some of us were fairly divided on BTX in general; Anand and I had spent the majority of dinners over the last year debating where the technology fit.  When Intel sent us a microBTX board rather than a standard BTX design we were extremely hesitant on what we were ultimately proving here with this analysis.

Years of planning, marketing and finally deployment have lead up to today's official release of Intel's first BTX product.  Although the BTX solution we looked at today performed poorer than a full ATX desktop, we need to put things in perspective.  Our microBTX case and motherboard ran a 3.4GHz Pentium 4 significantly cooler than a microATX case with the same volume, even though the microATX setup had an additional fan.  The noise benchmarks further tip the scales in BTX's favor.  How is Intel doing it?  Aligning the core components into a strict path for airflow to follow while using a slower 120mm fan to "push" air.  The internal wiring is reduced in favor of a single 24-pin adaptor, thing SATA cables are used instead of fat PATA ones; things inside the case are just less cluttered.  

With the flurry of SFF computers over the last few years, we know smaller computing platforms are necessary.  When we saw Shuttle, IWill and FIC designing their own small form factors to produce smaller and smaller desktop PCs, the results become obvious that an industry standard design was long over due.  The original goals of BTX have always been to decrease the form factor size and progressively reduce the size of desktop computers in general.  MicroBTX isn't the ground floor of the BTX standard, PicoBTX - even smaller than MicroBTX - was planned in the original design of the BTX spec.  When we see BTX mature a little more, letting Shuttle or FIC run with the PicoBTX blueprint might really show us some revolutionary computing. 

To succinctly put it, the BTX approach to a case/motherboard design is an approach in efficiency.  As we saw in our uBTX measurements, there were virtually no dead spots in the case, and these results were obtained with fewer fans.  The much larger ATX chassis with several additional fans (including a dedicated CPU heatsink fan) ran cooler, but we could see unused portions of the case.  The ATX case used more space and ran louder.  Don't forget that additional non-redundant fans increase the failure rate of a computer as well - more moving parts.  Now back to the question as to why Intel sent us a microBTX design rather than a full ATX setup.  Thermals and noise tests today showed us that a first generation microBTX setup ran slightly hotter - although not as hot as a standard microATX case - while reducing size, fans and noise.  This is significant as we will undoubtedly see cases and motherboards moving to smaller designs.  Many of us were skeptical for a long time, but after seeing the numbers and realizing Intel's long term plan to reduce the PC footprint, and not just on the OEM side, we can conclude that BTX is not hype.  It's obvious why Intel waited for Monday morning to lift their BTX platform - they have a winner on their hands.