Examining BTX

When the BTX form factor was first made public by Intel a few years back they claimed it to be a step forward, an innovative new design which would revolutionize the computer industry. Over a year ago we brought our readers a preview of Intel's reference BTX design.  We explained the layout and the three sizes in which these BTX motherboards would first appear: picoBTX, microBTX, and standard BTX. These sizes follow the same guidelines as those of past form factors with the variation in design and placement of components.


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Recently Intel sent out BTX evaluation kits to slowly ease in the news of the release of this new form factor. We were at the edge of our seats as we opened up the brown box with the "Intel" logo on it as we were about to find out just how innovative the BTX design would be. Included in our BTX kit was a microBTX case from AOpen, named the B300, an Intel Pentium 550 CPU, and of course, the long awaited D915GMH microBTX motherboard.

Examining ATX Examining BTX cont'd
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  • ZobarStyl - Monday, November 15, 2004 - link

    God looking at those small cases makes me tremble and remember my parent's old IBM Pentium I system where you had to remove the PSU and the CD drive to install the RAM. I was so glad when I saw computers moving AWAY from this type of design...forget footprint, I want a case I can actually work in.

    Either way, congrats to Intel on making a new Delleron case, but I'm simply not interested. Great for OEM's but useless for me, just like most of Intel's products...

    As for #3's question, why does Intel need it outside of helping their OEM buddies? Dual core is only going to make Prescott's heat issues stand out further and their x20/30/40's on the roadmap still are clocked in the range where they are going to be high heat output. All that heat has to go somewhere...
  • shabby - Monday, November 15, 2004 - link

    #5 that must be the canadian version, it'll keep us warm during winter by exhausting warm air into our faces.
  • Jeff7181 - Monday, November 15, 2004 - link

    Am I reading this right... warm air from the CPU is exhausted out the FRONT of the case????
  • mcveigh - Monday, November 15, 2004 - link

    I can't get past page 1??????
  • skunkbuster - Monday, November 15, 2004 - link

    will intel even need btx anymore? since they are probably going to be dumping the p4 in favor of the pM(eventually)?
    i thought one of the main reasons why btx was designed was to better handle the hotter p4 processors and to cool them more efficiently?
  • PuravSanghani - Monday, November 15, 2004 - link

    Thanks MAME, problem fixed :)
  • MAME - Monday, November 15, 2004 - link

    thumbnail of this article doesn't load on front page

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