Gateway PC Delivers New Motherboard Standard

30 Sep, 2004 at 6:50pm ET Article published in Tech

Gateway’s new 700GR desktop PC, based on a new chassis design that focuses on helping cool high-end processors and graphics cards, will be available this weekend at U.S. retail stores.

The 700GR from Gateway comes with Intel’s Pentium 4 550 processor, 1GB of memory, a 250GB hard drive, a DVDRW (CD-rewritable) drive and ATI Technologies’ Radeon X300SE graphics card with 128MB of memory. The suggested retail price is $1199, without monitor. The PC’s BTX (balanced technology extended) design moves the processor, chip set, and memory modules to allow a stream of air to flow through the PC’s chassis. The processor is located at the front of the motherboard, where cool air first enters the system. Meanwhile, the graphics chips have been rotated so that their exhaust is directed up into the airflow, instead of down into the chassis.

Will other major mobo manufacturers be far behind with introducing BTX products? -KF

Source: PC World

Comments

30 Sep 2004 ~ 7:04pm Geeky1 Hopefully not.
1 Oct 2004 ~ 9:52am QCH This is funny....
1 Oct 2004 ~ 11:09am KingFish baahahaha

nice catch
1 Oct 2004 ~ 2:34pm Thrax God, BTX, go the hell away. You suck.
1 Oct 2004 ~ 4:07pm KingFish what's the beef with btx besides new power connectors?
1 Oct 2004 ~ 4:23pm primesuspect pics!
1 Oct 2004 ~ 4:51pm TheBaron so P4 550 , 1 gb ram, a 250 gb hdd and... an x300se? what the hell?
1 Oct 2004 ~ 5:16pm Geeky1

Thrax wrote:

God, BTX, go the hell away. You suck.

BTX is far better from a cooling standpoint than ATX.
1 Oct 2004 ~ 5:27pm KingFish That's what I understand too Geeky. I know that in most cases you'll have to get another power supply and another case to house the mobo. Other than that I see no other major drawbacks. Plan all the upgrades at one time and it should be a smooth transition.

KingFish
1 Oct 2004 ~ 5:46pm Geeky1 Well, I was just talking to Thrax, and he says AMD says that the A64 cannot use BTX. If that's the case, it will never get off the ground.

That doesn't change the fact that from a cooling standpoint (and on a properly designed motherboard, a cable routing standpoint) that it is a fundamentally better form factor than ATX. Hell, AT is a better form factor than ATX in a lot of respects.
2 Oct 2004 ~ 12:02am KingFish If that's the case, it's enough to turn me away from supporting the standard myself. Why won't it support A64?
3 Oct 2004 ~ 7:08pm m0wh comes from the internal memory controller in the a64... it would be placed far too away from memory modules on a btx like mobo...
3 Oct 2004 ~ 8:59pm Thrax Precisely. That was the reason cited by the AMD engineers at Computex when BTX was unveiled. I'm sure there are more reasons, but to all of you who have said "Why don't you just (rotate/move) (this/that) component?" -- Don't you think the AMD engineers being paid six-figures thought of that?