- BTX Form Factor - Time for ATX to stand aside

AnandTech has an interesting article which talks about the new BTX form factor developed by the busy bees at Intel which was officially launched at the Intel Developer Forum (surprisingly enough) in San Jose recently.

The new form factor, which will come into play next year, is designed to deliver more efficient cooling than our current industry standard ATX form factor. It is literally legacy free with PS/2, serial and parallel ports not making an appearance on prototype motherboards and future proof with PCI Express 16x and Serial ATA compatible power supplies making up part of the standard. It's almost time for the 8 year old ATX standard to stand aside.

The redesign of the board layout was done in order to improve airflow through the system; moving the CPU to the "front" of the case allows it to be right next to the intake fan, giving it the coolest air out of any component in the system. You will then notice that the chipset is directly in line with the CPU, allowing airflow over the CPU's heatsink to be channeled over those heatsinks as well before exiting the case. This direct line of airflow allows for very efficient cooling of not only the CPU, but the voltage regulators, chipset and graphics card.

- A look at S3's DeltaChrome

Scott from The Tech Report was able to preview S3 Graphics upcoming DeltaChrome GPU which should heat up the mid-range consumer graphics market according to the author who seemed really enthusiastic about the new chip and what it is able to offer.

YOU'RE NOT GONNA believe this. I mean, really, you're not, because I wouldn't have either, had I not seen it with my own eyes. S3 Graphics is back with a new chip, dubbed DeltaChrome, which looks like it might just be strong enough to become a player in the mid-range consumer graphics market. I've seen the A0 silicon, first spin of the chip, running games like Unreal Tournament 2003 and the Chrome demo well enough to convince me the thing has potential. Real potential.

- New Vantec website

Our friends at Vantec have launched a brand new website. If you're a fan of Vantec products, stop by and check it out.

- X-Micro Wireless Router

Mariano Firpo from the X-Micro marketing team let us know about the release of their WLAN 11b Broadband router which offer 802.11B wireless as well as your usual array of router features.

I have uploaded the 82KB press release concerning this announcement to our servers which you can download. Please right click on this link and "Save Target As".

- Articles and Reviews from around the Web

- More Surprises from IDF Fall 2003! @ X-Bit Labs
- Plextor PX-708A 8x Dual DVD writer @ CDRinfo
- Triplex REDai 9600Pro 128mb @ OC Tools
- ATI & NVIDIA Roundup @ AMD MB
- Geil Platinum PC4000 @ SubZeroTech