MaximumPC 2008 03

W

ould you use a ball mouse? A VL-Bus graphics card? A

Socket 7 board? Then why the hell are enthusiasts still

embracing the 13-year-old ATX formfactor? It’s time we

started thinking about moving beyond ATX.

Today, we’re running quad-core boxes with two or more GPUs in a

formfactor created when people used serial and parallel ports and the

Pentium was the hot chip in town. In the near future, USB 3 will appear

on motherboards in the south-bridge chips. To route the ports, moth-

erboard vendors must run traces all the way from the south bridge to

the rear I/O shield. You might be able to do this with USB 3 data rates

on a four-layer board, but can it be done with USB 5? If it requires

more layers, it’ll add to the cost of the board.

Of course, Intel tried to fi x these problems with its BTX form-

factor, which cratered because of resistance from case-makers,

a new emphasis on cooler CPUs, and complete resistance from

AMD. But if I were hardware dictator for a day, I’d propose a new

formfactor called GTX (Gordon TX) that mandates:

A minimum motherboard stand-off height, so wires can be

routed safely and easily under the motherboard

RAM and expansion slots that are parallel to air fl ow in the case

A larger board area and I/O section to accommodate the dizzy-

ing array of connectors a modern power user needs

Standardized front-panel connectors for reset, power,

and LEDs

Two more expansion slots. The seven in ATX aren't enough with

the multi-GPU machines we’re building

Less distance between the south-bridge and north-bridge chips

A CPU cooling scheme that accounts for liquid cooling or vent -

ing from an area other than the front of the machine. While

we’re at it, let’s build in more cooling for the GPU

This probably sounds crazy because the push is for smaller,

rather than larger, PCs, but I say it’s time. Average people are moving

toward smaller machines or notebook PCs. Full-tower ATX boxes are

increasingly focused on the workstation market; we really shouldn’t

be handcuffed by formfactors designed to appeal to the masses.

And says it’s time to start looking beyond

legacy formfactors

in the lab REAL-WORLD TESTING: RESULTS. ANALYSIS. RECOMMENDATIONS

The failed BTX formfactor included many forward-thinking features.

GORDON MAH UNG

Wants to

Kill ATX

L

isteners to the No BS podcast know that I’ve spent the last

two months experimenting with 64-bit Vista on a system with

more than 2GB of memory. That’s right, I took my trusty XP/Vista

x86 dual boot and borked the entire thing by adding a couple

gigs of memory and installing an OS that’s still facing some seri-

ous growing pains.

The fi rst problem was stability—the machine crashed at the

drop of a hat and Windows rapidly became corrupted. After rein-

stalling Windows for the n th time, I fi nally installed components

one at a time and was able to determine that my Creative X-Fi

card was the culprit. With the X-Fi removed, and onboard sound

enabled, everything was much better, or so I thought.

Next up was suspend. While the suspend functionality in 32-bit

Vista works fl awlessly, I experienced crashes when suspending

and resuming in 64-bit mode. I fi rst theorized that the problem was

due to my memory confi guration. I’d populated all four banks on

my motherboard to reach 4GB of RAM, which can cause stability

problems. To counter that, I popped two 2GB Patriot DIMMs from

the Lab into the test machine—to no avail. The machine still fre-

quently crashes on suspend and resume operations.

What’s the upshot? After at least 10 complete reinstalls of Vista,

a switch to onboard sound, a new motherboard or two, and the

sacrifi ce of several chickens, I still can’t suspend or sync my iPod

(one of the many incompatible operations I’ve tried). I’m giving up,

at least for now. While performance felt moderately better than

with 32-bit Vista, especially on apps that can use more than 2GB

of memory, the benchmarks didn’t show it, and frankly 64-bit isn’t

worth the hassle.

Will Smith

Experiments with 64-bit Vista

Real-world testing yields surprising results

72 MAXIMUMPC (^) | MAR 08 (^) | http://www.maximumpc.com