Mike Brinker

BTX, PCI-E and DDR2

Yay for acronyms! Let's here it for my boyz! Anyway. The future of desktop computers as we know them is going to be rapidly changing in the next year. Intel is slated to be releaseing an interesting new set of standards that will change a lot of the current PC desktop form factors/standards/configurations (and who knows, maybe mac will follow suit later on). The following article at Tom's Hardware review has a lot to say about it, more tech than some can handle, but better than most of his rants. Overall, my feeling is one of caution.

PCI Express is a great jump in speed, but we haven't currently hit AGP 8x bandwidth limitations yet. Most of our current games and hardcore graphic intensive apps have barely begun to use the standard 128 megabytes of video memory dedicated to them, let alone the cards sporting 256 meg. This seems to be a bit of an overkill in the hardware realm, and more often than not, the newest tech seems to always have holes or problems. My biggest concern however is the new BTX form factor. It does sport better cooling considerations, but forces all the new computer cases and periphs to adhere to that standard. A different case size forces you to buy a different motherboard/a different motherboard size forces you to stick with the standard on the board for RAM and processor. Once you have those three, then you have to look at different PSU's, different exp. boards and essentially, you have a whole new PC from the ground up. It's like changing the chassis of your car. Everything sorta has to fit into it, and older stuff doesn't really play well with the new. PCI-X/PCI-E are going to be nightmarish at best, as there are different iterations of each as well as the fact that they each look exactly the same, except for the unobvious pin assignments. Same with DDR2. Looks close, but not the same. A big head ache I am not looking forward too. Feel free to respond after perusing the article, as it may not make much sense to the non-builder, but definitely an eye opener to those that tinker under the hood of their PC's.