Gateway planning cooler BTX desktop for September

BOSTON – One of the first desktops built using a new chassis design pushed by Intel Corp. will be released by Gateway Inc. in September, company executives said Monday.

Intel has talked up the BTX (balanced technology extended) reference design at several of its Intel Developer Forum conferences over the past year. The updated chassis and motherboard design replaces the current ATX design and allows PC manufacturers to deal with the ever-increasing amount of heat put out by modern components, said Ken Loyd, senior director of business marketing for Gateway.

As the clock speeds of Intel’s flagship desktop Pentium 4 processor have increased, so has the heat given off by that processor. Intel warned system designers in February that the latest version of the Pentium 4, the 90-nanometer Prescott core, consumes upwards of 115 watts of power under maximum operating conditions. Advanced Micro Devices Inc.’s Athlon 64 chips also consume a lot of power, up to 89 watts under certain conditions.

Increased current leakage at 90 nanometers means that more power escapes the chip as heat than in previous designs. As Intel takes the Pentium 4 across the 4GHz line next year, desktop builders will need to find a way to get that potentially damaging heat out of the system chassis.

The BTX design uses two fans, one at the front of the chassis and one at the rear. A steady stream of air is directed through the chassis from front to back, passing over the processor and chipset. These fans are larger than the single fans used in ATX designs, meaning they can turn at slower speeds and more quietly than older systems..

BTX desktops should put out less than 40 decibels, about 10 decibels less than current designs, Loyd said. A BTX desktop would then be as loud as the humming of a refrigerator, according to information from the U.S. National Institute of Health’s Web site.

The new BTX specification also addresses the placement of individual components on a PC’s motherboard. Graphics cards and other powerful expansion cards plugged into PCI (peripheral component interconnect) slots are notorious for the amount of heat they produce. Those cards have been rotated so they face up into the stream of cool air, unlike previous designs in which the heat given off by those cards was directed down to the base of the chassis.

Also, memory chips have been placed so they sit parallel to the flow of air. The placement of those memory chips in older ATX chassis and motherboards would have blocked the airflow passing through the system.

BTX motherboards will also be available in MicroBTX and PicoBTX designs. Regular BTX motherboards will be used in standard tower PC systems and are a maximum of 325 millimeters wide. MicroBTX and PicoBTX will allow PC designers to build small form factor and ultra-small form factor PCs. The MicroBTX boards are a maximum of 264 mm wide while the PicoBTX boards are a maximum of 203 mm wide.

Some gamers and PC enthusiasts with best-in-class processors and graphics chips have already faced these heat problems and beaten them with liquid-cooled PCs. Apple Computer Inc.’s newest PowerMac G5 uses liquid cooling in the most powerful configuration of that system, but most liquid cooling designs are viewed as too exotic and expensive for the mass market at the present time.

Gateway will release a consumer PC in September with the BTX technology, and in October will use the BTX technology in a business desktop that will also feature Intel’s latest 915 chipset, Loyd said. A spokeswoman for Hewlett-Packard Co. was unable to comment on unannounced products, and a spokesman for Dell Inc. did not immediately return a call requesting information about BTX PCs.

Intel is expected to eventually shift its processors away from the heat of the current Pentium 4 design to an architecture that builds on the cooler operation of the mobile Pentium M processor. The company has not confirmed those plans, but does plan to introduce dual-core designs next year that will present additional heat-related challenges for system designers.

REFERENCES: New Power Mac uses liquid cooling on high-end model, Jun. 9, 2004 Xeon, Itanium, Centrino march onward, Feb. 18, 2004