Chuck(G)
25k Member
Well, very few thin clients have fans (I can't offhand, think of any).
BTX was a terrible motherboard specification. The only company it benefited was the company that designed it, Intel.
As they couldn't work out how to reduce the power draw and heat output of their P4s, they just redid the whole motherboard so they could use ever more power hungry CPUs.
Systems that used BTX motherboards were often so cramped that you couldn't install a higher end discrete graphics card because the CPU heatsink gets in the way. Some designs put the main power connector right behind the PCIe slot, further limiting cards. Not to mention that the RAM slots were often stuffed near the edge of the motherboard, usually ending up being placed under the optical drive bays and an array of wires, making it an arduous task to add/replace memory modules.
BTX has a place in the history books and it needs to stay there, we don't need it back.
Ok, double. Although at the 5W end of things it's triple.
Something like a modern laptop's heatsink and heatpipe with radiators could easily be retrofitted to a 486 in a baby AT case and would likely cool passively with no problem. I just bring up the Aleutia fanless PC's as a recent example of what can be done in the fanless space.
My Dell T3400 with BTX is very quite with a large fan turning slowly for the CPU and chipset, ducted from the front of the enclosure. The little fan on the graphics card is far more noisy.I have a (partial) BTX system back at my parents' house. .. Sounded like a wind storm every time it was turned on.
That is why I talked about BTX2 and not bringing back original BTX. For example, it would be designed for today's CPUs with integrated memory controllers and with single-chip "chipsets".
For one thing, optical drives are becoming obsolete nowadays and I think there are now cases that don't bother with such bays.
I have a (partial) BTX system back at my parents' house. My only real problem I had with it, while I was using it, was that the CPU cooler was extremely loud. It was the only BTX cooler I could find, designed of course by Intel, and it had a small fan running at a very high speed blowing air across a LOT of metal fins. Sounded like a wind storm every time it was turned on.
My Dell T3400 with BTX is very quite with a large fan turning slowly for the CPU and chipset, ducted from the front of the enclosure. The little fan on the graphics card is far more noisy.
I had a number of BTX Dell P4 machines and they were crazy loud, especially the more power hungry P4s. Some of them moved so much air that the back of the case was like a wind machine.
But it does illustrate the cramped nature inside the case. With the massive heatsink, shroud and fan on the front of the case, there was very little room for drive bays or cards. You also need absurdly long SATA/ATA cables to get anywhere without obstructing the airflow path.
Perhaps the T3400 improved on that? One longer SATA cable (of 2 blue ones provided) is tidy but not essential for the most remote bay and standard 50cm SATA cables easily reach all other bays (like the red and orange ones shown.) Both PCIe-16 slots can take full-length cards with end support and dedicated fan provided.
With modern CPUs they no longer have to be as massive.
I'm pretty sure that case won't fit a full length PCIe card. You have to remember in BTX the slotted cards face upwards, not downwards. This is important because if you look at the back of the top slot, it's completely obstructed by the fan shroud and more obstructed by the fan in the very back of the slot.
Many beefy GPUs are 2, 2.5 or sometimes even 3 slots tall, which clearly won't fit because of the fan shroud. Even if you could shoehorn it in there, many GPUs still use blowers, which would be sucking on plastic and not be able to move any air.
This doesn't take into account the power connectors either. The extreme distance between the back of the card and the PSU, plus all of the stuff in the way would almost definitely require extension cables, which isn't desirable.
You want BTX yet you keep reaffirming reasons to not bring it back.
I don't want BTX back and I know about the dual slot graphics card problem, I want a new case standard that uses the same CPU cooling principle as BTX and does not have the problems.
Photo attached shows a plastic ruler laid across the top of the dual-slot card already installed and clearing CPU cooler along the full length. If you had an even thicker card it could go in the lower PCIE-16 slot.
Blue/black power cables for graphics card can be seen tucked into the empty front-lower disk bay and are long enough to reach any part of any installed card.
I think killing the optical drive will probably be easier than this, though I know that it will take time (probably years, right?). USB flash drives are already faster at reading than optical drives, not to mention smaller.You can have the BTX cooling system and bad placement of everything, or the ATX system with good placement of stuff and slightly worse airflow, but you can't have both. Like I said before, the memory slots dictate the entire system layout because of the critical timing involved and the length of the traces must be as short as possible.
I read about a technology Intel was working on where the parallel multi-drop memory bus was replaced with a fiber link between the CPU and a dedicated memory controller near the RAM slots. If this worked out, you could have the memory slots in a building 3 miles away and design the board however you wanted to.
That gaming board would fit in the lower slot without compromising it's air intake.
Keeping it in context, the T3400 is an 8-year old workstation and allocates 300 watts for the graphics card via two 6-pin connectors that were customary for that time.
And Win10 will, BTW.As for DVD's, I use mine for installing Windows and burning Windows 98 CD's because I keep losing them. That's about it. If Windows came on a Boot USB, I wouldn't add the drive to new builds (just one in the house will do).
Well, I've lambasted the PC cooling scheme for about as long as there have been 5150s. Cooling for interior components is laughable. Compare the cooling measures for Multibus, VMEBus, Eurocard or even C-bus and the PC's is just a bad design. The other bus configurations permit cooling of cards by blowing air through the card stack. How any ISA/PCI card gets adequate airflow has always been a mystery. The PC bus configuration is so uncharacteristic of IBM design practice, that I found it shocking.