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Hardware

More on BTX Motherboards 260

Posted by michael from the running-hot dept.
venger writes "Anandtech has an article on the new standard of cases and motherboards that is soon to be released. Looks like they are trying to cater for the increase in heat devices are now producing while keeping the noise levels down!" We mentioned BTX earlier.
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More on BTX Motherboards More

More on BTX Motherboards

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  • you use cases? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Brahmastra ( 685988 ) on Friday September 19, 2003 @03:07PM (#7007394)
    Just have the board lying on the table and a bunch of wires going all over the place. Have a pedestal fan blowing right on it for cooling. That is the sign of true geekiness.
    • I did that for a while, the problem is the footprint is way too big. I'm working on a "case" out of plexiglass that has all the components mounted to the outside so its very easy to get at to upgrade anything.

      Jason
      ProfQuotes [profquotes.com]
    • Amen. One of my friends in highschool used to have his computer strung up in pieces on high tension cables attached near the ceiling of his room.

    • Re:you use cases? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by aliens ( 90441 )
      Hehhe, I have two slabs of wood seperated by four dales, dawls, er (wood columns)

      Works well, a lil noisey, but easy to test stuff on!

    • Re:you use cases? (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 19, 2003 @03:22PM (#7007562)
      Just have the board lying on the table and a bunch of wires going all over the place.

      You use boards? Weak.

      I solder the chips together, directly. Barefoot. Everyday. 30 Miles. In the snow. With a knife in my thigh. And I like it.

      • Re:you use cases? (Score:2, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Damn, I would've killed for a knife during my barefoot-through-snow-30-miles-uphill-both-ways years. Lucky bastard. Kids today don't know what it's like to suffer!
    • Same thing here. I read the article and I was like case specs? WTF?
      The future is oversized desks. I've got four boards on the back of this desk behind the monitors and I'm building a new super triple decker monster upstairs that will have room to grow. Fill up a sixteen port switch and a stack of KVMS. Yum.
      Cases are so 90s, let's talk racks.

  • the real question (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    will these new motherboards be compatible with MOBIG-2 cases? I know a lot of sun servers use these cases.

  • Since dust can be a problem (Score:5, Interesting)

    by zymano ( 581466 ) on Friday September 19, 2003 @03:11PM (#7007431)
    why not a air filtration system ?
    • why not a air filtration system ?

      Dust is never really a problem, until you put in a filtration system.

      Do you want a filter maintenance schedule on your stereo?
    • You can already buy cases with air filters. Most, if not all, Lian-Li cases come with filters over the intakes. The only thing they really do is reduce the airflow and cooling potential of your intake fans.

      You have to periodically clean your filters anyway, so you might as well just dust your system with compressed air every now and then. Then you don't have to worry about reduced airflow.

      The thing I've noticed about the filter on my case is that it picks up large particles, but the small stuff still ge

    • why not a air filtration system ?

      I would be willing to bet that the #1 reason, is that it seriously impeeds airflow.

      I have a couple 80mm filters covering my intake fans, which limits air intake, unfortunately. So, just to prevent some ammount of junk entering your system, you have to have fans that are significantly more powerful, meaning more noise.

      Besides that, I'm sure the material I used will not do a great job filtering out all dust, so an even more restrictive filter would be needed. Not to ment

  • Nice but.. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 19, 2003 @03:12PM (#7007442)

    Will these cases/board/supplies work with 64 bit CPUs or are those another ball of wax? Apple's got their 64 bit desktop machines for sale already, any i386 ones I've seen are rack mounted or sold as "big ass servers" meaning "you canna build yer own cheap, laddy"

  • it's great, improved layout.. three models to pick (Score:5, Funny)

    by peculiarmethod ( 301094 ) on Friday September 19, 2003 @03:14PM (#7007467) Journal
    but..

    'graphics will use a x16 PCI Express implementation that offers 8GB/s of bandwidth. '

    will it be able to handle doom 3?

    pm

  • Big Water (Score:5, Funny)

    by geoffspear ( 692508 ) on Friday September 19, 2003 @03:14PM (#7007469) Homepage
    Ooh, they're going to start making the cases out of water? That's even better than making them out of cheese graters.
    • The cases won't be made of liquid water, rather the motherboards will be encased in ice sculptures. By the time the ice melts, you'll need to upgrade CPUs anyway.

  • I see a pattern developing !! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 19, 2003 @03:14PM (#7007474)
    I am going to be proactive in registering "CTX.com" through "ZTX.com"

    Nothing to do now but sit back and wait for the checks to arrive

  • why? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by obsid1an ( 665888 ) <obsidianNO@SPAMmchsi.com> on Friday September 19, 2003 @03:15PM (#7007481)
    I think the adoption of BTX is going to come very slowly. For the 90% of computer users out there, a 3Ghz P4 is already a huge overkill to browse the net and check email. What are these BTX computers going to run that will make them appeal to current users.

    Gamers, like usual, will be the biggest target for BTX. They are the only ones that will need the higher bandwidth bus for gfx and the faster cpus.

    • Re:why? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by elmegil ( 12001 )
      No no no no. The industry is struggling to figure out how to make money, so the idea is to make a new form factor that requires, in order to upgrade, the purchase of
      1. a new motherboard
      2. probably a new CPU
      3. a new case, and
      4. a new graphics card
      all in one shot. No more of this reusing everything but the component you want to upgrade stuff!

    • Re:why? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by sweetooth ( 21075 ) * on Friday September 19, 2003 @03:24PM (#7007576) Homepage
      This has less to do with processor speed and computing capabilities than it does with size and noise. There are a great many people buying smaller cases like the shuttle xpc [shuttle.com] because computers do everything they want and footprint, noise, and style are the things lacking now.

      Gamers won't care much about BTX unless there is a killer video card that will only be released in PCI Express form factor. At least initially.
      • As the article mentioned, ATI plans to release their top end cards in PCI x16 format once it's available. That'll draw them there in a hurry.
        • True, but I think this will be a quick and easy upgrade for Joe Sixpack as well. That is of course if Joe Sixpack decides he needs a new computer.

    • Re:why? (Score:3, Funny)

      by daves ( 23318 )
      What are they going to run? They'll run small.

    • True enough - but BTX is also good news for people who don't buy top-of-the-line equipment, as the adoption of newer standards and equipment tends to drive down the prices of older technology. :) Maybe once BTX becomes more widespread, I'll finally upgrade my system from its present 750MHz Duron and 384MB RAM.

    • I love this guy. I was just browsing through here looking for the "Why do we need anything new?" guy.

      You crack me up dude. Keep it kicking with your 486 and MacIIci's!

  • Maybe someone knows (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Apreche ( 239272 ) on Friday September 19, 2003 @03:15PM (#7007485) Homepage Journal
    The big change that I see with this new BTX spec is video cards will be PCI Express and not AGP. I think I can safely assume that PCI Express has a bandwith that is much faster than that of AGP can ever have, which is why it would be desireable. But isn't the point of AGP that it allows you to set an arperture and use some of the system RAM as an extension of the memory on the graphics card? So unless every PCI Express Video card has like 256MB plus video ram on it, wont AGP still be better? I really know nothing about this PCI Express thing except that expansion cards go in it, and it's fast.

    • Re:Maybe someone knows (Score:3, Informative)

      by sweetooth ( 21075 ) *
      Good god, is it really that hard to search for pci express at google.com?

      From an Intel developer network page.

      Desktop Platforms with PCI Express Architecture will be designed to deliver highest performance in video, graphics, multimedia and other sophisticated applications. PCI Express architecture provides a high performance graphics infrastructure for Desktop Platforms doubling the capability of existing AGP8x designs with transfer rates of 4.0 Gigabytes per second over a x16 PCI Express lane for graph

    • Re:Maybe someone knows (Score:5, Informative)

      by Zathrus ( 232140 ) on Friday September 19, 2003 @03:30PM (#7007635) Homepage
      I think I can safely assume that PCI Express has a bandwith that is much faster than that of AGP can ever have

      The AGP 8x spec has a max bandwidth of 2.1GB/s, while PCI Express x16 has a bandwidth of 8 GB/s. It might be theoretically possible to create a AGP 32x spec (although I doubt it), but the obvious question would be why?

      . But isn't the point of AGP that it allows you to set an arperture and use some of the system RAM as an extension of the memory on the graphics card?

      No, the point of AGP was to give a single slot increased bandwidth that's needed for modern graphics cards. PCI just isn't fast enough. Intel wrote into the spec that you could get away with sharing main memory as video memory in order to reduce system costs, but in practice nobody does this except for the absolute bottom tier PCs. The performance hit is huge.

      wont AGP still be better?

      No. Although it's questionable that PCI-X will really provide any speed increases. AGP 8x has a negligible speed improvement over AGP 2x, and quadrupling the bandwidth again isn't likely to do much either. I'm pretty sure PCI-X can still do the main memory-as-video memory trick, but there's really no need or desire to do so. If your card doesn't have enough memory to hold the textures then you're going to have a massive speed hit when you need to get them from memory. In practice this speed hit is so severe that the amount of bandwidth has relatively little impact on things -- it's the latency that kills.

      • Re:Maybe someone knows (Score:4, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 19, 2003 @04:03PM (#7007943)
        pci-x != pci express

        pci-x has been around a while

      • Re:Maybe someone knows (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        One of the bigger benefits of ditching AGP is that AGP does not allow reads from video memory (at any worthwile speed anyway). PCI-Express will allow that. This would be great for render farms because you could render on your or specialized boards. I am sure there are other applications I cant think of atm.

      • Re:Maybe someone knows (Score:3, Informative)

        by Malor ( 3658 )
        Actually, AGP was really developed to solve a problem that went away on its own; 2-D graphics.

        The big bottleneck on PC graphics for years and years was the bus speed. When you are doing 2-D graphics, in essence you have to copy your graphic data out, frame by frame, to the display memory. The system bus was always the bottleneck here. To animate a 320x200 screen at 30 frames per second, you have to push out about 2 megabytes per second. 640x480 is four times that; 1024x768 takes about 24 megs per seco
      • One thing to keep in mind is that when PCI came around, people had a hard time fathoming what could take advantage of it. Initially, AGP showed little advantage over PCI. There may be something yet, I wouldn't discount it just yet.
    • One of the very nice features of the PCI Express graphics cards is that PCI Express is fast in both directions, finally allowing you to (drivers permitting) get data back out of the graphics card at a reasonable speed. There are many applications for this, from array processing to high-quality rendering -- but they are not viable today because it takes forever (say, large fractions of a second) to read an image back from the graphics card.

      I'll be first in line to buy one of these when they become availabl
      • 32 MB of memory could only add a couple of dollars at most to the cost of a card, it's just not that big a deal.

        It's a big win on laptops though, where space is at a premium.
    • In a way, I think AGP really didn't need to happen. AGP mostly added a pipelined transfer system, the double and quadruple data rate and the ability to use system memory for texturing. I think they could have done this by adding these features to PCI. To the OS, an AGP bus looks like another PCI bus anyway because of how the bridge operates.

      I think PCI-X is much like a merging of AGP concepts and adding clocks and I think an optional wider & faster data path. What is nice is that from what I've r

  • 64 bit x86 from Intel? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by bstadil ( 7110 ) on Friday September 19, 2003 @03:19PM (#7007522) Homepage
    The socket on the BTX board shown has 250 or so extra pins that was "explained" by Intel to be for Power reasons.

    There is a story floating on the net that this is not so. However it is likely that it for axtra bit in and out IE maybe the Secret Yamhill project is still alive and if not kicking at least not dead.

    Yamhill is if you remember the Intel backup solution for 64bit using the AMD Opteron model.

  • Best case design....period. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by BWJones ( 18351 ) on Friday September 19, 2003 @03:19PM (#7007531) Homepage Journal
    Well, Apple has lead the world in case design going back to that Blue and White G3 they produced where the side of the system dropped open with full access to all the internals, many of them right on the door. (I might argue that the old 8600 and 9600 designs are still better than any other Wintel case I've worked with).

    However, this G5 I am looking at again establishes Apple as the premiere company for case design. The case itself is aluminum for efficient transfer of heat and the multiple zone design with multiple low speed fans is absolutely the way to go until optical computing hits it's stride. All bits of the case are easy to access and they are absolutely quiet.

    Looking at the BTX cases, I see nothing impressive when it comes to cooling or quiet other than perhaps the cool circular heat sink.

    • Unfortunatley the G5 case has so many fans and so much space taken up by cooling that there is no room for adding more hard drives or optical drives.
    • Way before the G3... try to Mac IIci/cx form factor... you took out one screw, and practically every component would then slide out, pop up, or otherwise become accessible. It always reminded me of the bugs bunny cartoon where Bugs undoes one bolt on the back of a tank and the whole thing falls apart...
    • The case itself is aluminum for efficient transfer of heat

      Except that it's been proven that aluminum vs steel case makes absolutely no difference as far as heat transfer is concerned. There's no thermal coupling between the case and the hot components.

      multiple low speed fans

      Which good PC cases have had for 5+ years.

      All bits of the case are easy to access and they are absolutely quiet.

      Again, in the PC world for 5+ years. It's not my fault you bought crappy cases all the time.

      Looking at the BTX ca

    • Re:Best case design....period. (Score:4, Informative)

      by f0rt0r ( 636600 ) on Saturday September 20, 2003 @01:50AM (#7010626)
      Try this case out for size -> http://www.procooling.com/reviews/html/antec_sonat a_case_review.php . It's gotten rave reviews for being super quiet and cool. I just assembled mine earlier this evening, and you can barely tell it is on unless you look at it closely. The 120mm fans in front and in back are dead quiet, plus the power supply is designed to be quiet, also. I even purchased a Zalman 6000CU CPU fan with speed control to keep the noise down.
      Oh, the case also has rubber
      grommets on the hard drive mount points to deaden any noise the HD's may make. And the fans are mounted with rubber-like screws to deaden any noise that may be caused by the fan vibrating against the case.

  • Oh come on, thats got to be the worse acronym I've ever heard!

  • I'm gonna have a hard time programming my AVRs... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mofochickamo ( 658514 ) on Friday September 19, 2003 @03:24PM (#7007574) Homepage Journal
    without a serial port. I use ATMEL's STK500, which uses the serial port to program the microcontrollers.

    From article: 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.

    • You could always buy one of those USB Serial ports.

    • Re:I'm gonna have a hard time programming my AVRs. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by anubi ( 640541 ) on Friday September 19, 2003 @03:53PM (#7007850) Journal
      Ohhh yes... I have AVR capability too. I love Atmel's products - they make really neat stuff for us embedded guys who don't wanna wanna use a sledgehammer to tap a tack into place.

      And a helluva lot of other legacy stuff.

      But, you know, a lot of those old machines were designed very conservatively. I even have some old 286 running, and will continue to run them until they no longer function. Don't replace your legacy system... kinda like replacing your old SUV with the latest sports car should the bobbling heads start advocating it. Sure, the later one may be faster, but the old SUV will tote the kids.

      In a pinch, a USB to serial converter will probably work. If its works, great, otherwise, its another case of having to do yesterday's work all over again, instead of doing today's work. Remember, you already got paid for yesterday's work... you don't get paid again for doing it again.

      I did yesterday's work yesterday. I built my foundation years ago. Today, I use it. Kinda like years ago I put copper pipe in the house because I did not wanna mess with it ever again. I pour concrete foundations, because I know the wood one, albeit cheaper, will rot, and force me to do all my work over again. Some people have the money to do yesterday's work over and over and over again. Sure, they have the latest foundation in the neighborhood. But even I wonder how they economically justify such a paradigm.

      Once I invest in a good solid foundation, I intend to use it for the lifetime I designed it for. Its not like I wanna design the Grand Coulee Dam, and demolish it every couple of years because someone came up with a different mix of concrete... Once I go through the trouble of building the thing, I intend it to perform its intended function from then on, usually indefinitely. Kinda like those Romans did things, where their aqueducts and roads still function as originally designed to this day.

      I really take no thrill in developing the capability to sign checks to pay others to do the work... I take great pride in having the capability to do it. ( And also take comfort in knowing how my stuff works, as well as what to do if it doenn't work the way I want it to work. I think almost all Open-Source guys have this same mental picture. )

  • 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.

    So now I'll have to buy expansion cards (and waste slots) to use my IBM Model M, UPS comms cable, modem and printer?

    • no.

      All those can go on your linux server which is always the hand me down.

      If you really must plug in an old device do not use expansion cards, thats ineficient, and frankly I hate that. Use a usb port replicator, thats what they were there for and you can easily migrate across machines.
    • While your point is not without merit, I don't understand what you would prefer.

      PS/2, serial, and parallel ports are old technology with few new peripherals being released. If you want 4+ USB ports and firewire ports and ethernet ports, eventually some legacy ports are going to be removed. They just can't keep making room for new ports without losing something.

      Just last week I built a new system for a friend who's still on dial-up. I have a few 56k modems lying around, but when I went to install the modem
      • Guess you don't work on embeded systems, networking equipment, or real computers much. All of the above have serial ports as standard diagnostic facilities. I can see trashing the PS/2 and Paralle ports but DB-9 ports don't take up much room and the interface chips cost pennies. Besides I have a board with 8 USB (4xUSB-1.1, 4xUSB-2), 2xFirewire, 1xLPT, 2xSerial, PS/2 mouse and keyboard, 1xEthernet, 5.1 channel audio, 1xAGP, and 6xPCI slots. All in a standard ATX form factor. Yes ISA is dead with the excepti
    • Yep, that's pretty much the gist of what happens to legacy hardware; that's kinda the point.

  • Anandtech reviews... (Score:4, Funny)

    by LookSharp ( 3864 ) on Friday September 19, 2003 @03:40PM (#7007723)

    *Banner Ad* *Banner Ad* *SideBar Ad*
    I really like Anadtech reviews,
    Page 1/162 [Next Page->]
    *Banner Ad* *Banner Ad* *SideBar Ad*
    but they really do seem to have
    Page 2/162 [Next Page->]
    *Banner Ad* *Banner Ad* *SideBar Ad*
    very little content on each page of their
    Page 3/162 [Next Page->]
    *Banner Ad* *Banner Ad* *SideBar Ad*
    lengthy reviews. Anyone else notice this?
    Page 4/162 [Next Page->]
  • If you're like me and are already on the quest for a quiet PC... here are some good/decent sources:

    www.quietpcusa.com
    www.silentpcreview.com

    Nexus makes some pretty good stuff I hear.

    Something to be aware of though, there are some sites out there advertising a 14dbA SilenX PSU for $50... and they are counterfit. The real SilenX company DOES produce 14dbA PSUs, but for closer to $100. These authentic ones have been renamed away from the SilenX brand. See www.silenx.com fore more info on that :)
  • I can't believe no one else posted these yet! It's just not a Slashdot Thread without them!

    "I, for one welcome our new BTX Overlords..."

    "All your form factor are belong to us!"

    "Microsoft == Evil!"

    "In Soviet Russia, CPU cools Front Intake Fan!"

  • Something to include in BTX (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jerw134 ( 409531 ) on Friday September 19, 2003 @03:50PM (#7007825)
    One thing I want to see is a standardized case connector for the power and reset switches, LEDs, and speaker. Having each of them on a separate cable is just stupid. If they standardize that, I will be very happy.

  • For the Love of Gawd, why is there legacy ports? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by The Lynxpro ( 657990 ) <lynxpro@@@gmail...com> on Friday September 19, 2003 @03:53PM (#7007846)
    For supposedly a state-of-the-art motherboard design (all 3 BTX reference boards), why did Intel wuss out and keep legacy ports on these mobos?

    I'm looking at the pic for the micro-BTX board (yes, the micro edition) and I still see two (2) PS/2 ports and one (1) parallel port. What a waste. I bet they'll chicken out and retain ATA and floppy drive ports on the mobo itself too.

    http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1876&p =3

    C'mon Intel, Apple did away with legacy ports back in 1997. This design won't hit the market until 2004. Quit slacking. You either want the mobo manufacturers and PC brands to move away from legacy or you don't. I personally would rather have the $3 or so that goes into putting these dopey ports on the machines go toward something else, like Bluetooth support or extra Firewire ports.

    • For supposedly a state-of-the-art motherboard design (all 3 BTX reference boards), why did Intel wuss out and keep legacy ports on these mobos?

      Just because they define a place for them in the standards does not mean a board is required to have them. They also define locations for sound, ethernet, and VGA ports, which certainly every board doesn't have. Contrarily, you can get legacy free ATX boards now if you really want them, and I'm sure this will be no different. But putting the ports in the spec a
      • But putting the ports in the spec allows them to meet the needs of all users, and for Intel's part it takes away a possible reason for some manufacturers to use ATX instead (as otherwise, anyone making a board with legacy ports would have to either use ATX or take up expansion slots with ugly brackets).

        Good argument. However, when Intel does not take a strong stand, OEM's such as HP will continue churning out PCs for the home user that will continue to offer these ancient relics of interfaces and in turn,
    • IMHO, the worst piece of legacy hardware is an x86 CPU. No amount of new ports/interfaces is going to help change that.
    • It seems kind of silly to moan about the PS/2 ports; they're simple, low speed, and have small connectors, so they're hardly a burden to support. More importantly, there have been lots of great keyboards/mice produced over the years using PS/2 connectors which there's absolutely no reason to obsolete.

      For instance, I have a `Happy-Hacking Keyboard Lite' that I bought (well my company bought) 5 years ago, and it still murders every usb keyboard that I've seen (though I actually also have a usb HHK Lite 2 :-

  • Planned obsolescence at its best (Score:5, Insightful)

    by foonf ( 447461 ) on Friday September 19, 2003 @03:56PM (#7007879) Homepage
    The advantages of moving the CPU to the front of the case, defining thermal zones, and so on, are clear, but overall this does look to me more like just another excuse to obsolete the cases already in use and add another marketing buzzword for manufacturers.

    The most serious change to BTX versus ATX is switching the side of the expansion slots. What possible advantage could this have, aside from making it incompatible with existing ATX cases? In the reference examples they show, it just means that everything is moved to the opposite side of the case. As for the specially defined locations for the CPU and motherboard north and southbridges, they are pretty similar to a lot of boards already on the market (just reversed of course), and as the sizes of components change few BTX boards in the future will follow these specs exactly anyway. And the rest of the "advantages" (riser cards for horizontally-mounted video adapters, a sub-micro form factor, air ducts to chassis fans) already exist in practice with ATX anyway.

    In the mean time, I hope I'll still be able to get new-generation ATX mainboards for the next couple years, because I see nothing in this new format worth buying a new chassis over.

    • Re:Planned obsolescence at its best (Score:5, Informative)

      by cmowire ( 254489 ) on Friday September 19, 2003 @06:06PM (#7008851) Homepage
      A few things.

      First, heat rises. Which means that you can use convection.

      Second, I think they are deliberately making it incompatable with ATX because they want to make sure that you put a BTX motherboard in a proper case. To be quiet, they are going to have to run with as little cooling as possible for a given configuration, thus little things like having the vent holes done up properly are going to count.

      Third, you are more likely to have short PCI cards than room in front of the CPU for hard drives. Sure the video cards are still huge, but most everything else is pretty small.

      Fourth, the main push is for tiny motherboards, not large motherboards. The full size format is there mostly so that there will be a large enough BTX audience to make a difference.

      It should be interesting to see how this plays out. From the looks of it, it doesn't look to be too dual-CPU friendly. There's not much that's strictly wrong with the ATX standard right now (There was major Baby-AT compatability problems and random headaches back in the day) so there's not as much of an incentive to switch form factors. The enthusiasts, who can be counted upon to upgrade regularly and choose whatever brightly colored, feature-filled motherboard is available, aren't going to find much of an audience. It doesn't look too friendly for 1 and 2 U rackmount systems.

      But it might do some good work on replacing the LPX form factor and many of the myriad not-particularly-standard tiny ATX standards.

      Of course, those who have been watching the computer market for a long time know that the case market has moved towards small cases, and then back to tower cases, several times so far. Apple didn't revolutionize the computing market with the iMac, the case has been part of your positioning ever since the who-knows-how-many colored Cray supercomputers. People loved C64-style keyboard-is-the-computer cases for a span of time. People wanted thin, sexy cases before almost everybody switched to tower cases that could be hidden under the desk. Beige Toasters like the early Macs and the PS/2 mod 25 were popular for a time, but there was a span where nobody made them.
      • I think Intel's answer to that for desktops is hyperthreading or multi-core cpus. I would also guess there isn't enough wiggle room in their thermal specs to take an extra cpu. It's an 100+ watts per now.
    • The most serious change to BTX versus ATX is switching the side of the expansion slots. What possible advantage could this have, aside from making it incompatible with existing ATX cases?

      If this little change is so important, why don't we see anyone manufacturing ATX tower cases where the motherboard mounts on the left side rather than the right. You'd get the same effect (CPU in line with the case fan) without designing a completely new style of motherboards. This sounds more like an excuse to elimina
  • What's so new and great about this? You want a quiet and cool pc? Turn it off.
  • All -

    I have to admit I'm less-than-impressed by the new BTX standard. Allowing for larger CPU heatsinks is a solid advance, but the ATX standard could have been modified to require that kind of offset without necessitating the switch to new case designs. Placing the CPU closer to an air intake is another plus, but again I see no reason why the ATX standard couldn't have been modified to allow for this as well.

    I'm also less-than-impressed by the way the cooling solution has been implemented. Utilizing t

  • bloody ethernet port (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Espen ( 96293 ) on Friday September 19, 2003 @05:34PM (#7008643)
    Why are these monkeys still putting the ethernet port in top of two usb ports? Why would I ever unplug my computer from the network (unless I was moving it)? Why then allow the ethernet cable block my access to the USB ports, which I'm much more likely to want to unplug? This has got to be one of the most stupid aspects of the port layout in current designs, and I pains me to see it hasn't dawned on the designer how stupid it is.
  • From the article:

    "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."

    I don't really have a problem with removing the PS/2 ports. I do on the other hand have issues with removing the serial and parallel ports. I am all for changing their form factor (the D-Sub style connectors are way too big) but it requires so little logic to implement these features that are very helpful for debugging a

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