During the past year, we’ve seen several basic changes on the design of our computers. Some of them are already out on the market and among those we see the Serial-ATA and the SFF barebones as the most noticeable ones. Now, the new expansion technology PCI Express begins to show its face too, and even if we won’t see it on the market in the next few months we see that the development is making progress quickly. In many ways, it is about the ambition to get more user-friendly computers. Not just about being easier to handle physically (upgrades and alikes) but also to lower the level of noise and the size of the PCs. Computers are becoming a part of the home and hence it’s also important that they are suitable for the home as any other furniture. With these design changes, large or small, it’s getting untenable to only optimize already existing platforms, thus we aren’t surprised to see the next step of the development; a new standard for cases, mainboards and PSUs.
The ATX standard has been used in many years and it was a great step from the forerunner AT. However, it’s now time to once again check the build-up of the cases and mainboards through the BTX standard (Balanced Technology eXtended). The new standard is developed to increase user-friendliness and especially make the PCs cooling ability a lot more effective. It’s obviously a standard made of the S-ATA and PCI Express in mind which of course is positive. The BTX standard won’t arrive on the market until 2004, but there are already a lot of thrustworthy information about the standard and its three different formats, BTX, microBTX and picoBTX.
Anandtech.com has written a really interesting article about the subject and you can find it here.
