New Btx Backwards

[VladyLama]

anyone notice how the new btx standard is backwards from
atx.
requires all new cases for everyone getting btx..

 

[GlobalFear]

Or some crafty dremel work.........

 

[V0ltage]

this has been pretty common knowledge for some time... i really like how it is now, espcially cool that you can now see your videocard.

 

[drewb99]

Bah, let's hope the OEM systems built to BTX are too expensive to be practical and the standard dies in the water.

 

[puck]

I took apart one of the gateway BTXs at work last week. From what I could tell the standard didn't seem to work to well. WIth teh Gateway there was only one fan pulling air from the front over the cpu and then out. This provides no real cooling for the rest of the case.

Granted RAM and such doesn't get too hot but I would feel a lot more comfortable knowing some air was moving by.

 

[Impulse]

I took apart one of the gateway BTXs at work last week. From what I could tell the standard didn't seem to work to well. WIth teh Gateway there was only one fan pulling air from the front over the cpu and then out. This provides no real cooling for the rest of the case.

Granted RAM and such doesn't get too hot but I would feel a lot more comfortable knowing some air was moving by.

I don't think Gateway adhered too strictly to the BTX spec, or whomever manufactures their mobo didn't... 'Least in so far as the previously published BTX info goes, maybe the spec changed or maybe I've misinterpreted past articles, more on this discussion here:

http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=808063

 

[puck]

I dug around for some pics of what the standard was suppose to look like, and from what I can tell Gateway actually stuck with the standard. The only difference I notice is the hardrive being on the bottom and not the top.

http://www.a1-electronics.net/PcHardware/GenCompInfo/2002_3/BTX_FormFactor.shtml

Still not sure how I feel about this new standard, it looks like crappy air cooling to me.

edit: One thing you can't tell from the pics is that the CPU is passivly cooled with a heatsink, no CPU fan.

 

[doormat]

I heard that the Athlon64 platform cant use the BTX form factor due to the fact that there is no northbridge, and the distance between where the RAM is supposed to be and the processor is too far for the signal integrity to hold up. Is this true?

 

[puck]

I don't know about that. The distance from the CPU to the RAM seems no longer than normal ATX boards.

I would have to see what I can find about that.

edit: Just did some googling and looks like it is a valid problem. Which is defintly another strike against BTX for me at least. I think having the memory controller on die was a fantastic idea and has provided great speed improvement.

source: http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=2070&p=2

 

[Impulse]

I dug around for some pics of what the standard was suppose to look like, and from what I can tell Gateway actually stuck with the standard. The only difference I notice is the hardrive being on the bottom and not the top.

http://www.a1-electronics.net/PcHardware/GenCompInfo/2002_3/BTX_FormFactor.shtml

See, in many of the pictures I had seen on print magazines a while ago, the PCI cards were usually shown up top as if an ATX board had been flipped and the I/O stuff re-located; dunno if they were just mis-interpretations on their part or what...

I don't see any benefit to the spec as Gateway has used it tho, all it does is heat the incoming air faster than you would otherwise with ATX ('specially if you use something like Artic Cooling's Silencer which keeps most of the video card heat away). BTX actually looks kinda limiting to be honest... Less options for auxiliary fans (top/sides would be of less benefit if the CPU is closer to the front), etc.

 

[bornin1975]

silly move by intel i think. i hope amd eats intel someday, do i now have to replace my recent brand new system components just because intel feels like changing everything.

 

[[MADHACKER]Weapon]

Yay a new form factor because Intel can not meet the power requirements and proper cooling for their processors anymore....

I think its time Intel faces the music that they aren't on top anymore. If AMD can turn out processors that run cooler and are more powerful there is no reason why intel can't. Uping the voltage and clock speed dosen't mean anything anymore, if a 2.4GHz amd can slaughter Intel's latest and greatest and cost two times less then companies will look elsewhere then Intel.

BTX will be dead soon, and Intel along with it. I see a buy out in the future, AMD purchases Intel, and then all the competition left is cyrix and maybe IBM if they decided to dable more into the processor market.

 

[puck]

As much as I love AMD (I even own stock in them), I think it would still be good if Intel was around to provide some competition. But I would love to see AMD with a much larger market share.

One thing that really pissed me off at work one time was a guy returning a AMD64 E-Machine laptop because it didn't have an intel processor in it. He had to pay a 15% restocking fee and buy a more expensive laptop jsut so he could have an intel CPU. I told him blatantly that the 64 was better but he still refused to keep it. Such a dumb ass.

 

[Deadlierchair]

I think its time Intel faces the music that they aren't on top anymore. If AMD can turn out processors that run cooler and are more powerful there is no reason why intel can't. Uping the voltage and clock speed dosen't mean anything anymore, if a 2.4GHz amd can slaughter Intel's latest and greatest and cost two times less then companies will look elsewhere then Intel.

BTX will be dead soon, and Intel along with it. I see a buy out in the future, AMD purchases Intel, and then all the competition left is cyrix and maybe IBM if they decided to dable more into the processor market.

I don't think your evaluation is quite accurate. Intel still controls something like 80% of the market so it's unlikely that they will be dead soon. They still make good products as well, but had bad luck with this batch. AMD had bad luck for a while when they were stuck with the later Bartons that couldn't compete with the fastest P4s. It's all a cycle and what goes around comes around. AMD may have won this battle, but things are always changing. It would be disappointing that we might have to buy a case based on our CPUs in the future, but hopefully that will work itself out.

And as consumers, we need both Intel and AMD (and maybe more) to stay in business. Without competition things will grow stagnate, it's simple economics.

 

[Elledan]

Yay a new form factor because Intel can not meet the power requirements and proper cooling for their processors anymore....

I think its time Intel faces the music that they aren't on top anymore. If AMD can turn out processors that run cooler and are more powerful there is no reason why intel can't. Uping the voltage and clock speed dosen't mean anything anymore, if a 2.4GHz amd can slaughter Intel's latest and greatest and cost two times less then companies will look elsewhere then Intel.

BTX will be dead soon, and Intel along with it. I see a buy out in the future, AMD purchases Intel, and then all the competition left is cyrix and maybe IBM if they decided to dable more into the processor market.

I'm not too certain about Intel getting bought out by AMD (it's not like they're only making CPUs), but from what we've been able to see from Intel, it's clear that things are changing, forgive the pun, 'inside Intel'.

They first dropped their next revision (after Presho^H^Hcott) of the P4, because they apparently realized that it would draw too much power, hence making it nearly impossible to cool (forget about aircooling). Now they've finally adopted X86-64 (despite first denying that there would be any need for 64-bit computing (outside their Itanium market)), and are working on parallel (slower, wide) designs, instead of focusing on fast, narrow designs.

BTX in this respect is more or less a relic of Intel's old strategy (how do you aircool a CPU which produces over 100 Watt of heat?). I therefore don't expect Intel to put much weight behind it. Since AMD et al. aren't very thrilled about BTX either, let alone the average customer, BTX is facing an uphill battle, one tougher than WTX faced before it was slaughtered.

 

[puck]

I'm waiting for an announcement on how much heat these dual cores are going to put out. I heard one rumour of 100w - 150w for Intel's design. With that much heat, cooling is going to become insane even for the normal home user.

Eventually shouldn't people start wondering why they need this much power just for normal everyday use? I still don't understand people taht buy top of the line systems for e-mail and internet use, but that is more than likely caused by sales and marketing from retail stores and computer manufacturers.

 

[Impulse]

Eventually shouldn't people start wondering why they need this much power just for normal everyday use? I still don't understand people taht buy top of the line systems for e-mail and internet use, but that is more than likely caused by sales and marketing from retail stores and computer manufacturers.

For one thing, bloated sofrware slowly keeps creeping up and making older processors outdated, I remember when I said the same thing "why would anyone in my family besides me need more than 1GHz of processing power"... Couple years later that old 1GHz Dell system they're still using feels somewhat sluggish after loading XP and all the latest aps on it, even with a memory/hard drive upgrade.

Longhorn will actually require Direct 3D 9 compatible cards to have all it's features on... I'm not saying you need a top of the line system to run regular apps, but the acceptable level at which they'll run keeps inching upwards and the way they manage to keep it affordable for the average consumer is by constantly staying on the cutting edge and developing for the enthusiast and other demanding sectors first and letting the technology filter down with time.

Many people do buy way more than they need tho, that's all marketing, same reason there's way more people out there with RAID setups than you could ever make a case for, same reason you pay $40+ for 200 channels of cable of which you watch maybe 20 or 30. Technology moves on tho so by the time it's needed it's actually affordable.

P.S. IBM still makes a number of processors for countless aplications including desktops, just not x86's. It'd be horrible for consumers if either AMD or Intel went away for whatever reason tho, Intel isn't even close to being in danger of defeat... At worst they'd lose some market share if they don't change their course, 'least for the forseeable future.

 

[puck]

For one thing, bloated sofrware slowly keeps creeping up and making older processors outdated, I remember when I said the same thing "why would anyone in my family besides me need more than 1GHz of processing power"... Couple years later that old 1GHz Dell system they're still using feels somewhat sluggish after loading XP and all the latest aps on it, even with a memory/hard drive upgrade.

Yeah, I miss the old computer days when programs were coded much more efficently, granted they wern't as complex but still. People take too much advantage of powerful systems and use that as an excuse to write crappy code. Main reason why I use Linux, the code is very efficent 90% of the time and what isn't efficent is almost always fixed by other programmers.

I work at Best Buy (Hopefully for only a few more months), they started selling their own barnd of computers (VPR matrix, pieces of crap) but they had RAID 0 in the damn things. People keep calling us up asking why all their data is gone when one of the drives die. "But..But..I had 2 hardrives...shouldn't that have a backup?", I can see have RAID 1, but RAID 0? No average consumer needs that.

 

[Elledan]

I'm waiting for an announcement on how much heat these dual cores are going to put out. I heard one rumour of 100w - 150w for Intel's design. With that much heat, cooling is going to become insane even for the normal home user.

Intel knows this, and I very much doubt that they'll put out a dual-core, 150+ Watt CPU. A dual core Power5 and Opteron run cool compared to a single core P4. Releasing a less powerful (none of the CPU designs Intel has were designed from the beginning to be used in a dual core configuration, unlike the K8 and Power5) and hotter CPU would be suicide.

Eventually shouldn't people start wondering why they need this much power just for normal everyday use? I still don't understand people taht buy top of the line systems for e-mail and internet use, but that is more than likely caused by sales and marketing from retail stores and computer manufacturers.

It's not so much about using the most powerful system, but about parallel processing. Being able to run processes in parallel usually results in a far more responsive system.

 

[CanonicalAbstract]

Yay a new form factor because Intel can not meet the power requirements and proper cooling for their processors anymore....

I think its time Intel faces the music that they aren't on top anymore. If AMD can turn out processors that run cooler and are more powerful there is no reason why intel can't. Uping the voltage and clock speed dosen't mean anything anymore, if a 2.4GHz amd can slaughter Intel's latest and greatest and cost two times less then companies will look elsewhere then Intel.

BTX will be dead soon, and Intel along with it. I see a buy out in the future, AMD purchases Intel, and then all the competition left is cyrix and maybe IBM if they decided to dable more into the processor market.

Cyrix is competition?

and I'll take ATX, thank you. All this BTX talk has made my decision...