Is BTX no longer necessary?

mindwalker · Post by **mindwalker** » Fri May 07, 2004 4:38 pm

Given that one of the main reasons for the BTX form factor was to provide
better cooling due to Intel's very hot running Pentium 4 (Prescott and above)
chips is BTX still necessary now that the P4 line has reached the end of the
road and will be replaced by the much cooler running Pentium-M based chips?
Any thoughts on this?

ForTension · Post by **ForTension** » Fri May 07, 2004 5:06 pm

When the M chips are scaled up to 3 GHZ, the heat will return. (And you have several in a machine) Plus there's the issue of graphics cards that BTX should deal wtih better.

nutball · Post by **nutball** » Fri May 07, 2004 11:18 pm

Indeed. The Pentium 4 (and to a good extent AMD) have conditioned the market to accept ~100W processors, and I can't see any way on Earth that either company is not going to exploit that market acceptance.

The Pentium M may be a low-power chip now, but there's no way it's going to stay that way! Having said that, what it *might* mean is that the lower-end chips will run a lot cooler than the current low-end P4's, so if they have enough grunt for what you want to do then that's all good. It *might* also mean that we get much for flexible power management and speed throttling built into desktop chips, so they really only crank up to full power when doing truly stressful things.