Did BTX really deserve to die?

J

Josephson_Junction

Weaksauce
Joined
Oct 21, 2012
Messages
69
I'm curious about the form factor's benefits and drawbacks. I understand why it died out, but it seems like it's a genuine improvement over ATX, cooling-wise. To ask a theoretical question, what if BTX had a resurgence?

I know it's anecdotal, but the E521 in my signature uses BTX, and I was impressed with how cool and quiet it remained under stress from Prime95. It has only one 120mm fan mounted at the front - not including the fan cooling the GPU.
 
It was genuine improvement in CPU cooling. Everything else suffered. Most BTX Dells die from bad caps because they're directly behind the CPU cooler and just get baked.

BTX deserved to die.
 
I think it was designed for a different era, before case design was really thought of - i sit here looking into my 650D and i have 2 cpus puuling cold air from the huge front fan, straight into the heatsinks and straight out the back of the case. Its simple and elegant, it would be better if i could exhaust the heatsinks straight up but thats a mobo limitation due to size.

Also ATX has grown into several different sizes supporting multiple cpu sockets per board - i'm not sure that BTX could have done so
 
Jorona said:
Most BTX Dells die from bad caps because they're directly behind the CPU cooler and just get baked.
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How much of that was actually from the plague, though? Honest question, not being snarky.

I do see where you're coming from though, considering this was around the time of Netburst.
 
What would be the point of a motherboard larger than ATX now? The trend is towards much smaller sizes, like mini-ITX, NUC, Raspberry Pi, etc. The real question is, why is ATX still alive?
 
Mainstream computers are becoming m-ATX, ITX, etc.

ATX is still alive because there's a market in the enthusiast segment for it. In fact, in the past few years we saw the emergence of E-ATX (wider than ATX) and XL-ATX (longer than ATX, requiring a case with at least 9 expansion slots). It's not trending towards one thing, it's diversifying to suit all niches.
 
BTX was designed to help cure the heat issues created by Netburst. Since we now have self-contained water cooling units which have proven thus far reliable, as well as better air cooling designs than we had back then I'd say BTX simply wasn't needed. There were additional drawbacks of the design as well but the main problem is that no one wanted to use it besides Intel and a few OEM's who were probably coerced into using it. AMD seemed unlikely to get onboard with BTX and companies like ASUS, MSI and Gigabyte had little interest in the design either. Case manufacturers also didn't want to have to create an additional lineup to go along side ATX while the transition took place.

So yes, it did deserve to die despite any advantages it may have had.
 
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evilsofa said:
What would be the point of a motherboard larger than ATX now? The trend is towards much smaller sizes, like mini-ITX, NUC, Raspberry Pi, etc. The real question is, why is ATX still alive?
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5.9 years on these forums and you have to ask that question? Where's your veteran [H]ardness.
Because you cant fit 8 DIMM sockets and dual socket 2011s on a shit fuck ass slow ATOM ITX piece of shit.

I like to have a nuclear death cannon computer not some little fruit juice named palm sized weako box.

I can't run quad 7970's water cooled in some playing card sized thing that cant even run a flash video.
 
evilsofa said:
What would be the point of a motherboard larger than ATX now? The trend is towards much smaller sizes, like mini-ITX, NUC, Raspberry Pi, etc. The real question is, why is ATX still alive?
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The enthusiast market may be a bit niche, but you can't forget all of the workstation users out there.
 
tangoseal said:
5.9 years on these forums and you have to ask that question? Where's your veteran [H]ardness.
Because you cant fit 8 DIMM sockets and dual socket 2011s on a shit fuck ass slow ATOM ITX piece of shit.

I like to have a nuclear death cannon computer not some little fruit juice named palm sized weako box.

I can't run quad 7970's water cooled in some playing card sized thing that cant even run a flash video.
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You should still be able to run a dual gpu card in a mini-ITX box. Watercooled 3770k, 690, and a small SSD array inside a mini-ITX case, and that should max any game out now. Where's the Tetris-heart in you?
 
Dan_D said:
BTX was designed to help cure the heat issues created by Netburst. Since we now have self-contained water cooling units which have proven thus far reliable, as well as better air cooling designs than we had back then I'd say BTX simply wasn't needed. There were additional drawbacks of the design as well but the main problem is that no one wanted to use it besides Intel and a few OEM's who were probably coerced into using it. AMD seemed unlikely to get onboard with BTX and companies like ASUS, MSI and Gigabyte had little interest in the design either. Case manufacturers also didn't want to have to create an additional lineup to go along side ATX while the transition took place.

So yes, it did deserve to die despite any advantages it may have had.
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BTX was designed for the high end Intel® Pentium® 4 and Intel Pentium D processors but we had a hard time getting the case and motherboard manufacturers to pick it up but its death blow came when we released the Intel Core™ 2 Duo processors. Going from a 130w TDP processor to a 65w TDP processor made it clear that while BTX was a nice idea it just wasnt needed going forward.
 
Eureka! said:
You should still be able to run a dual gpu card in a mini-ITX box. Watercooled 3770k, 690, and a small SSD array inside a mini-ITX case, and that should max any game out now. Where's the Tetris-heart in you?
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but you wouldn't have room for any other expansion cards, you wouldn't be able to run more than a single dual-gpu card, ram limitations and limitations on built-in peripherals (USB3, extra Sata 6 ports, extra LAN ports etc). You can meet many people's needs with mini-ITX, but you can't definitely can't meet the needs of people who need flexibility in mini-ITX
 
IntelEnthusiast said:
BTX was designed for the high end Intel® Pentium® 4 and Intel Pentium D processors but we had a hard time getting the case and motherboard manufacturers to pick it up but its death blow came when we released the Intel Core™ 2 Duo processors. Going from a 130w TDP processor to a 65w TDP processor made it clear that while BTX was a nice idea it just wasnt needed going forward.
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BTX never took off because few OEM's wanted any part of it. Builders like HP and Dell were onboard but I doubt they wanted it as they'd have to build ATX and BTX chassis for AMD and Intel offerings separately. It was bad enough the motherboards and thermal solutions are different between those two CPU companies. Logistically that makes things tougher for them. Case manufacturers wouldn't have liked it anymore than the big OEMs would have. It could really have hurt some models and product lines had they tried to make both. The consumer lost as well because it made switching between AMD and Intel based configurations harder. Long term upgrades were more of an issue as well if your case may not have carried over when you wanted it to. Cases designed to convert between the two also had to make concessions in some areas in order to work.

And it wasn't only that TDP's dropped all of the sudden that BTX became worthless. Advances in cooling design helped tame 130watt TDP CPUs and beyond. My QX9775's were 150watt TDP CPUs and I had two of them in my machine without having to go BTX. Form factor changes simply weren't the right solution to the problem.

BTX sucked and it deserved to die a horrible death.
 
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