AMD Ships First DTX Form Factor Prototypes 134
MojoKid writes "When AMD first revealed their plans for the DTX open industry standard, the intent of that early briefing was to explain
AMD's vision for interoperable small form factor systems. Today AMD
provided more details and a specific design example of the DTX small form-factor standard. This HotHardware article showcases a prototype system built on a low power AMD Athlon 64 BE-2350 processor and 690G chipset motherboard with integrated graphics. Maybe the HTPC just took a small step toward platform standardization?"
Chassis design and internal layout found here; (Score:2, Informative)
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Still too big... (Score:1)
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> "I'm of the opinion that they should go taller and slimmer. I like the size/distribution of the Shuttle SFF. This has a very large footprint for not having a place for a expansion slot graphics solution."
So do like everyone did with the original desktops - turn them on their ends ...
For the first decade, nobody had towers unless they made them themselves ...
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Small form factor computing, requires a large amount of cooling, the most efficient way is almost invariably to just allow for convection to do most of the work.
The old sch
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I don't think you took a good look at the pictures.
Yes, the Multia specifically had openings in the side, NOT the top, so you either had to upgrade the single 60mm fan, or yo
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If you want something better designed the mac pro is apparently also very good in terms of keeping itself cool without being too noisy (don't have one myself but I know someone who does). The lower end macs aren't bad on the noise front either.
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I know plenty that specifically look for systems that are less noisy. In fact that seems to be a much wider trend.
With so many manufacturers trying to make profits in a commodity market, extra cooling and less noise is a very strong value-added point.
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This has a very large footprint for not having a place for an expansion slot graphics solution.
If you had read the article more closely, you'd have come across this passage:
And on the opposite side of the CPU you'll find the system's pair of expansion slots (a mini-DTX board would have only one slot). The design of the motherboard and chassis means only half-height cards can be used, basically because there is no room for a riser. The slots can be any combination of PCI Express or standard PCI slots, however.
The pictures show what looks like a PCI-Express and a legacy PCI slot, so you can throw in expansion cards. Half-height ofcourse means that any powerful graphics cards are out. Personally I think I like the Shuttle-style systems better, but for another reason: thermal management. Those cube model SFF's with their well thought out CPU heatpipe cooling integrated with case fan, together with room for fullsize graphic cards a
Actually VERY good idea - good for cooling problem (Score:2)
Definitely making the MB smaller will make it harder for those large quiet cooling fans to find space to co-exist. The shuttle systems do it right with making the CPU fan hanging out of the back of the case.
Re:Actually VERY good idea - good for cooling prob (Score:2)
not really that small in pics (Score:2)
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Now, if there was only a software solution th
Dual core and on video with dvi as well as a pci-e (Score:2)
Yes, but will it run Linux? (Score:2)
Not bloody likely until they get either RadeonHD or ATI fglrx to support whay they already have in the market.
Hint, hint: The 690G on-board HTPC chipset with HDMI, component-out...
Platform standardization? - Not likely. (Score:5, Insightful)
BTX has been an utter failure, not because there was anything wrong with it, but that there was nothing compelling enough to shift people from ATX.
Personally I'm a *big* fan of the improvements that ATX gave us over AT - Mostly that I'm no longer likely to electrocute myself by touching the live power switch in AT machines. Ouch.
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Personally I'm a *big* fan of the improvements that ATX gave us over AT - Mostly that I'm no longer likely to electrocute myself by touching the live power switch in AT machines. Ouch.
The ATX standard is nice, yes. But I was never a fan of the impossible-to-test ATX power supplies. With the old AT boards, if you built a system and it wouldn't turn on, you could test the power supply on its own to rule it out. With an ATX, if you don't get anything when you press the power, it could be power supply, mobo, CPU, RAM, or who knows what else.
They took what was previously a nice system for singling out variables and made a mess. Though i will concede that the standardized ports on t
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i havent tried this myself, and the site says "do this at your own risk".
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This one might work (Score:1, Informative)
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Probably payback for BTX, which Intel designed requiring memory to be too far away from CPU for AMD's (on board IOMMU) requirements.
BTX (Score:4, Informative)
BTX wasn't a total failure. A lot of the BTX improvements - like what direction air flows through your case - were silently integrated into existing "ATX" machines.
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DTX, on the other hand, can fit into a standard ATX case. And DTX cases can also fit mini-ITX boards. And there's plenty of markets
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Oh, so you love this DTX prototype then, since it's entirely compatible with ATX?
Your first sentence had me confused...
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PCI express x1 is about twice as fast as PCI if you are transferring data in one direction only and even better if you are transferring data in both directions at once because it is full duplex (PCI is only half duplex) os it is faster but not earth shatteringly so.
Game physics calculations will probablly move onto the graphics card which is on nice fast PCI Express x16.
SATA, scsi and gigabit ethernet cards are already making the move to PCI express, graphic
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Personally I have 3 machines that have every PCI/PCI-E slot in them filled, and I could use more.
Just because you and your friends don't use all slots available doesn't mean there aren't plenty of us out there who do.
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Re:Platform standardization? - Not likely. (Score:4, Interesting)
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While using optical/spdif they are ok but for headphones they most often suck, atleast my athlon64 mobo and this new macbook pro.
Also a real (creative) card will add environment sound features for games and use less cpu power.
A good sound card are very cheap nowadays aswell.
Why live with inferior shit?
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Also I think it adds surround sound, which you are free to argue isn't good or whatever but still you only have two ears and the only reason why you can hear where sound comes from is because they change how it sound from different directions, something which CAN be emulated and probably better with two speakers and emulation than headphones with multiple speakers but no emulation.
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HUH? who in their right mind would want a surround sound card?
A good HTPC has a Toslink or other digital audio out and use real hardware for surround sound.
In fact every high end HTPC I have ever seen uses digital audio only into the Surround sound processor/amplifier.
Works only for pre-encoded (Score:2)
It's enough when playing DVD and similar format with precompressed streams.
It's not enough for using other entertainment that produce livre surround sound in real-time.
You either have to use analog transmission out of the PC, or switch to some other less popular manufacturer that has on-the-fly DTS or Dolby Digital live encoding (Auzentech for exemple).
Because people keep buyin
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But, what home theater apps produce live multi-channel audio? DVDs, ATSC recordings, etc. all have pre-encoded digital audio.
The only thing I know of that generates multi-channel audio are games. While this little box looks great for home theater (HTPC) use, it does not look like a gaming rig.
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Haha!
If you want digital I/O, the cheapest piece of crap built-in sound card will do just as well as anything else you can buy... It's digital, the AC3/DTS/LPCM sound is transferred completely unchanged, no matter what.
The DTX prototype has room for two half-height cards. Hauppauge PVR-150 or similar should be perfect for TV capture. I do
still has legacy components (Score:5, Insightful)
All we need is SATA, USB2/Firewire, digital video, and fiber-optic audio. Such a board would be cheaper, faster, smaller, less power hungry, and less complex than today's boards. Once widely adopted, it would make troubleshooting much easier and make components less expensive to produce with better signals.
Re:still has legacy components (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep, nodding along...
Awake now. Analogue audio output ports are far from legacy - almost every non-computer speaker system on earth uses analogue. Headphones too. I can agree with your other points*, but it's far too soon to get rid of analogue audio.
Cheers,
Ian
(*well I would do - I'm on a Mac here which has none of those anyway)
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Re:still has legacy components (Score:5, Insightful)
Except, you know, that they're not, because 99.999% of the market doesn't want to pay for that.
Copper cabling is perfectly adequate to carrying a digital audio signal with adequate forward error correction; it's adequate for carrying a digital video signal, for goodness sakes. That'll eliminate all your pops and clicks right there. It can make sharper turns than fiber, too.
In fact, I fail to see the point of fiber other than that TOSLINK got established early on for audio already. Optical audio is pretty much one of those "legacy" connections you're so keen to get rid of, and yet one that most people don't have equipment for. The "future" (whether it's a good idea or not) is probably a copper HDMI line running to a receiver, carrying both the audio and the video. Heck, HDMI will carry more, completely uncompressed audio channels than TOSLINK can, at a higher bit depth and sample rate.
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Common mode noise suppression in digital or analog line level signal wiring can be very important. Naturally, none of the current copper standards except ethernet and Midi provide ground isolation. USB and Firewire can be isolated at the endpoints but that is rare except in medical or industrial equipment. Professional quality audio equipment relies on balanced wiring of course which largely altho
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As long as we're being pedantic, I'd like to point out that IEC 60958 (aka coaxial S/PDIF) is supposed to be ground-isolated at the receiver side.
Never mind the fact that almost nothing is built that way. I only point this out because you were seriously discussing the relative merits of balanced speaker cables, and felt a powerful desire to feed your bizarre lunacy.
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I actually never knew that. Of course as you point out nothing is built that way which I assume is the reason I have never noticed a ground isolated coaxial S/PDIF port. The data rate is not that high so I am surprised it could not be handled the same way that MIDI did it.
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The only gear I'm personally aware of that has an isolated coaxial digital input is an old Audio Alchemy DAC (model DDE 1.1, IIRC). The example of this that I have in my living room made explicit mention of this on its instruction sheet.
But, I'm not so sure that one could not just simply use a suitable 75-Ohm transformer to break S/PDIF grounds. Seems that just about anything from the conventional broadcast video world would work fine, where such devices are so
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Perusal of the S/PDIF specifications (I have not had the occasion to use it myself) shows that those audio guys knew what they were doing. It uses biphase mark code and the bit rate can be up to about 4 MHz (depending on how you count it) so transformer isolation sho
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I use SPDIF - used it when I had PCs a few years ago (switched to Shuttles about the time SPDIF was becoming common), and I use it now on my Macs. I still disagree with you on this point however - how can I plug my headphones into SPDIF? And the ubiquity isn't there either - if I want to use my laptop to play music somewhere that isn't my own carefully set-up room, I'm still better off having analogue available.
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In either case proper circuit design and filtering is necessary to handle AM modulated RF. Shielding can help significantly but can also cause problems with ground loops for instance if not properly handled.
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Yeah, that's nice and all, but not everything that uses SPDIF has TOSLink fiber ports. Many SPDIF devices use coaxile RCA connectors. And any one who has any serious exposure to coaxile SPDIF will tell you that in many cases you would actually be better off with analog audio ports! Because SPDIF doesn't have ANY ERROR CORRECTION, so the moment there is a glitch in the digital up-link the whole thing goes out of sync un
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The moderately-priced consumer sound systems I've seen that support SPDIF don't actually do anything about that, to the extent that its a problem, since they will take SPDIF into the receiver which uses conventional speaker wire out the speakers. Its basically, for most users, a way to cut out one analog-hop and the potential quality degradation associated with it out of
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That's for sure. Only I still can't figure out why my headphones seem to work fine when I plug them into my phone, but they don't work when I jam them into the spdif out on my soundcard....
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It's backward-looking thinking like yours that keeps the PC industry from achieving its full potential.
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Unfortunately, you're completely wrong. Solaris only recently dropped support for the Sun4m architecture, which was discontinued in 1995. Apple has made one OS shift and two hardware architecture shifts since the introduction of the first Mac. Even Linux, wh
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On linux libc6 was introduced in 1996, most current distros don't ship libc5 so binaries older than that can't be easilly installed on current linux.
Afaict 64 bit windows vista supports most 32 bit windows apps, 32 bit windows was current for well over a decade (i'll be generous and say 1995 since windows 95 was the first widespread 32 bi
You forgot Ethernet (Score:1)
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The latest Shuttle PC's don't have serial ports, parallel ports, keyboard/mouse (PS/2) ports. The video card had DVI ports. Windows XP doesn't support loading device drivers from anything but floppy, which makes building these a fascinating experience. While Vista installs as easily as Linu
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Unless you do video editing from mini-dv camcorders or have a 1g/2g ipod you probably DON'T
need Firewire. USB is slowly catching on in the video capture area, but Firewire
is still the way to go (most DVD recorders have a Firewire connection to download video
from dv camcorders but NOT USB).
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The parent wanted to get rid of PS/2 ports because USB ports can do the same function.
The same argument holds true for Firewire. USB can do the same thing. Therefore, firewire should be ditched by the parents logic.
Only got a PS/2 mouse? Too bad. Camcorder only does firewire? Too bad.
If you check the tone of my post, you'll see those legacy devices are actually needed for a lot of pretty good reasons.
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Some need serial, some need parallel. Some need analog video, most need analog audio of some form (OK, essentially all of them).
You can have a system without the legacy cruft if you like, but I don't really feel like replacing $5000 worth of equipment in my basement because of your design. I certainly don't imagine that the labs out there want to replace millions of dollars of serial-connected research equipment because of your plans, though.
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Such a board would be nominally cheaper (if at all), no smaller, no less power hungry, and nominally less complex. THAT is why the ports are still there. Unless space is a big issues (as in notebooks) there's absolutely no reason to remove the legacy ports.
My expensive keyboard, IDE drives, CRT, Parallel and Serial devices (et al.), aren't going away, and I'm sure not going to get a $5 cheaper motherboa
FlexATX (Score:1, Flamebait)
I don't see how a 229x191mm board is any different to the new 224x200mm board apart from the fact that it will fit in those stupidly sized ITX cases (where a FlexATX board would be about 3mm too wide).
Isn't the solution to kick all these dumbfuck Chinese manufacturers of ITX cases into supporting just a little MORE than ITX?
Wasn't FlexATX open in the first place, what makes DTX "open"?
I call redundant whoring by AMD trying to get t
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That and a standard NOTEBOOK form-factor would be nice for the consumer, but makers of expendable items don't need to care about upgrades.
Nice artcile, too bad... (Score:1, Insightful)
For those who would like to actualy get some info about DTX and not get drowned in a sea of annoying ads, check out:
The actual DTX standard site [dtxpc.org]
No point (Score:2)
This is just AMD trying to get its label out there by following the herd rather than creating anything innovative or geneuinely useful.
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I'm actually typing this on such a system right now.
what happened to B and C? (Score:2)
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Use laptops as a starting point (Score:5, Interesting)
Seems to me that a no screen, no battery, no keyboard 'laptop' form factor in a case you can open combined with a planar you can add things to using the mini-PCI bus or just coupling it through a docking base would be the solution. In fact you could use a dumb coupling through the docking port via a flat cable and build all the expansion electronics and devices into the back of an outboard monitor. Basically you take the PC in the montor design and break it in two so that the basic PC is separate from the expansion bay in the monitor. Keyboard and mouse through a USB port or Bluetooth. With some work you could get the PC to be barely larger than it's own AC power adapter, sans drives.
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Laptop components everywhere.
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Mini Mac (Score:2)
One thing I will point out is a few months ago a friend who dinigrates Linux and Unix came over with his old 8mmm Exabyte tape which he recorded on a S
I'm using an AT keyboard on my Mac mini. (Score:2)
The biggest problem with the Mac mini hardware-wise is the lack of a video card slot and the over-aggressive styling that required them to compromise on power for the sake of cooling.
For SCSI, there's things like this [cwol.com]. Unfortunately you'd still need to boot to something other than OS X because Apple doesn't provide a UNIX tape device... there's no
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You'd have a system that was as expensive as high-end (mini) notebooks, requires notebook components rather than much cheaper and higher-end desktop components, and can only support a very, very low level of heat/power consumption.
Fine if you want a very expensive, very low-end system in a tiny package that isn't practically expandable, but that's not what DTX is supp
It's called the Mac mini (Score:2)
The thing is, laptops have even more upgrade and repair compatibility problems than SFF PCs, and laptops (and the Mac mini) make a lot more compromises on power than a SFF PC really needs to.
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That's the result of the kinds of tradeoffs they made to make it that small.
It's also got a slow slow slow hard disk.
And unless they seriously upgraded the USB ports, it can't charge even an iPod Shuffle without an external powered hub.
Those comp
What's needed for a real HTPC... (Score:2, Insightful)
Given that a lot of people would want to run somthing like LinuxMCE, having to decode 1080i using a foss decoder would require somthing in the region of an Athalon X2 5000+, which makes housing it in a tiny box and ventilating it properly somwhat troublesome.
In honesty, I'd rather not run an HTPC at all. XBMC was doing it all for me, right up until I got a HD screen and wanted to
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http://www.xbox.com/en-US/community/news/2007/0408-im.htm [xbox.com]
http://www.redkawa.com/blog/post.php?t=892 [redkawa.com]
There's already a standard (Score:2)
VIA makes mini-ITX boards, Intel makes mini-ITX boards and... wait for it.... AMD makes mini-ITX boards.
Standards are good, but too many of them is like not having any.