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Has the BTX form factor bombed?

M

Meursault

Junior Member
I did a search for a BTX mobo and case on newegg and came up with very slim pickings. Most of the articles I Googled up were dated late 2004.
 
In OEM sales, not per say.

Dell + Gateway sell tons of BTX systems, even AMD BTX systems.

But outside OEM circles, i'd say yes.
 
Last I read. By mid to late '07 Intel will only offer BTX form factor boards.

Asus, Gigabyte, etc, will probably offer ATX boards using current Intel board chips.



...Galvanized
 
BTX failed because the only reason it was created was to make it easier to cool Intel's horrifically hot P4 chips. Now that they have the Core2 line that isn't so hot, the redesigned cooling of BTX isn't a very big deal. There's not a whole lot else to make anybody interested in BTX. If it's ever to replace ATX, mainboard makers will pretty much have to just suddenly stop making ATX boards, which will mean case makers will also have to suddenly come up with new cases.

BTX is sort of too highly integrated I think for the enthusiast market. It's almost like an OEM-proprietary design in how the cooling fits together in the case and is made to cool the CPU and video card. It doesn't leave a lot of room for customization.
 
Originally posted by: n7
In OEM sales, not per say.

Dell + Gateway sell tons of BTX systems, even AMD BTX systems.

But outside OEM circles, i'd say yes.
Click to expand...

He said it all. :thumbsup:
 
Originally posted by: Leros
What they need instead of BTX is graphics cards with the components on top.
Click to expand...

BTX flips the entire mainboard over and mounts it on the other side of the case, like Macs, so the components on PCI, AGP and PCIe devices are all on top. 🙂 And in any desktop case, the cards would be vertical so it wouldn't matter.

However this is an issue with the specification of the slots, not an issue with the graphics card makers. If you put the components on the "top" of a card, you immediately impinge on the space intended for any other slots that might be above it. Since the graphics card maker can't be sure of what mainboard the card is being installed on, they don't want to make a card that might be bumping into the memory slots, or the processor cooler, or blocking out other PCI or PCIe slots above the card.

Airflow over the components matters much more than any improvement that would be gained simply from inverting the card due to the "heat rises" issue. A GPU core is going to convey heat into the PCB no matter how it's oriented, and any GPU that has heat issues ought to have active cooling anyway, or a very very large passive heatsink, preferably with some airflow from the case fan (which is one thing that BTX specifies).

For those few mid- and low-end GPUs that can get by with a passive heatsink, putting a slightly larger heatsink on it would be about as effective as inverting the whole thing if you were looking towards allowing higher clock speeds.
 
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