As was made evident by the proliferation of Small Form Factor (SFF) machines into the market, the need for a smaller, quieter successor to ATX has been building over the past 8 years. A couple of IDFs ago, Intel announced their development of the successor to ATX, which was codenamed Big Water. At the Fall 2003 Intel Developer Forum, Intel officially branded Big Water as the Balanced Technology eXtended form factor - or BTX for short.

Anandtech has the scoop on what BTX motherboards and cases will be bringing next year, time to start learning about what's changed with BTX and its improvements, they say.

I was looking at some of the proposed design ideas for the BTX Form Factor and it just sucks. All the designs are about the same size as the current form factor and do not add any real changes. They just move things around to cause problems for suppliers and retailers and OEM manufacturers and people that want to buy a standard case for future computers.

Take into perspective that one of the benefits of developing PCI Express and Serial ATA was suppose to be that a motherboard could be smaller. I do not see any sort of shrinkage of the motherboard. The die size on a processor keeps getting smaller, but the processor footprint and the pin layout keeps getting larger and contains more pins. I do not see this as progress.

I could think of innovations that made more sense. For instance the motherboard could have the Memory mounting from the back of the motherboard through a hole in the mounting tray. That way the user serviceable items could be accessed from the opposite side of the case or through a small removable panel. It is kind of a waste to have both IDE Drives and SATA drives so lets quit putting IDE ports on motherboards or at least make SATA the default drive interface since it is the fastest. People do not want to have to have some floppy drive utility just to install a SATA hard drive. That is just stupid. Death to all floppy drives.