Everywhere I have looked, and even with my own testing I have found that BTX runs considerably hotter than any rival ATX based form factor, and on average 9-11 degree's celcius more. Couple this with a prescott core cpu and you have a major problem. On Anandtech their tests show that they had trouble keeping the prescott cpu's within safe heat levels for more than one hour which was barely long enough to do the tests. BTX will be in 3 factors pico, micro and standard BTX, and remove motherboard manufacturers choice to differ their boards from intels design, also it takes away a lot of case modding potential for those who want to, and for those who like a really cool system, or with prescott a "normal" heat range BTX is not for you.

With this form factor, it's almot like the old NLX form factors. Those cases are really cramped to work in and it doesn't offer much in terms of air circulation. With all the components really close to each other, then yes it does make sense to use a heat sink over those components.

What I would like to see is the BTX form factor board in a larger more spacious case design of a tower design. If they can incorporate that into their design, then it may be well worth looking at if they can keep the CPU temperature down.

The only reason the BTX was invented for is to fill a bunch of them with sub P4 3.6GHZ processors and let people word process all day. If you would like to build a large fully adequit computer for a high demand of graphics, sound, or video you need to use a differant form factor.

While the BTX is a step in the right direction in an attempt to keep the P4 furnace's cooler, I agree with Sander's summary and your view that the BTX is NOT better. If you closely examine the pics, you see that the Video card riser and card itself form a virtually closed tunnel which cannot possibly be good for todays high power/heat cards. Talk about MTBF! Compare the air inlet at the front of the case with the patheticlly few perforations on the backplane and you have to ask yourself how all that hot air is evacuated. 1/2 the holes are above the backside of the video card and on the opposite side of the cards HSF! Hello, heat rise's remember? The primary concern appears to be cooling the CPU and everything else is a byproduct. How well do you think you RAM is cooled? Not very by the looks of it. Warm air from the CPU and chipset heatsink washing over them, lovely.
Water cooling is really the avenue to pursue and here's an article that shows Intel is at least considering it.

http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/20041015/water_cooling-03.html

I personally am water cooling my HT/All purpose PC for cooler AND quieter operation in my living room while allowing excellent overclocking. Looking to use watercooling on my HDD,chipset,GPU next. Time to get rid of these noisy 8cm fans all together. A quiet 12cm fan is the way to go for motherboard, pci cards, & ram cooling

Ok maybe this is a stupid question but if you can't do anything high end on it why are you buying a P4 instead of there other chip? or even a low watt amd?

Kamakazi, while the overall case temp is considerably hotter, the main concern is the processor, especially with the Prescotts.

The easiest way to circumvent this is to do what I've been doing on my amplifiers for years... stick a fan on top. A 120mm fan or two 80mm fans placed on top, either blowing in or out, would keep that system cool to the touch.

If you're using it for an HTPC, you shouldn't really be considering using a high end Geforce or Radeon... because for $50, you can get an XGI Volari that has native high definition support with both DVI and component out and full MPEG2 hardware acceleration. Best of all, they generate almost no heat.

I really want to see what the midtower BTX looks like to compare to my designs.

Soooooo.....

Once again, it appears that the boys from IntHell have really dropped the ball when it comes to considering an overall solution by instead opting for single-mindedness of purpose.

Sure...it is neat that they have concocted a way to calm down the output from the Prescott volcano, but at the expense of all other components. And IF BTX becomes the next de-facto mobo standard a LOT of ppl are going to be hurt by it. While having component placement standardized can be a GOOD thing, the way that IntHell is currently dictating things system designers are going to be VERY limited in what they can do with BTX as it stands now...ASSUMING the layout of the mobo, as evidenced by the setup from AOpen, is applied to ALL the flavors of BTX to come.

One can only hope that a 'standard' BTX mobo design will differ greatly from the micoBTX planform. Doing so will open up many avenues for system designers and us 'home brew' DIYers.

I LIKE the idea of the separate air duct direct to the CPU...so why not just make it a straight-thru design and NOT ask its preheated air molecules to do double-duty on the other heat producing components. Why not let it do its thing and route an additonal air source to cool the remainder of the box? That shouldn't be hard and would certainly not entail many more fans to do the job....especially seeing as how many high-end systems currently on the market, and those built at home, have enough whirling fans to make an aircraft carrier jealous! I would think that a well-defined airflow scheme, outside the realm of the CPU cooling duct, would need no more than 4 fans maximum.

Steve

HONESTLY!

I think the Intel designers r complete idiots and they came up wiht this "BTX" design in like 5 minutes. The whole idea is thta they are trying to make the conventional computer smaller and generate less heat but run queit. WAT I WUD DO IF I WAS THEM (btw i think amd shud do this) is make like another form factor called lets say ATX2 and jus reaarange the motherboard compinents and put some watercooling on it!!!!!!!! that wud be super quiet and run super cool and im sure wiht a few design innovations thye could make a very small watercooling sysytem and then AMD wud OWN Intel ONCE AGAIN!!!!!!!!!

I JUST THOUGH OF THIS!!!!! WUDNT THE WATERCOOLING SYSYTEM TAKE UP AS MUCH SPACE AS THAT MASSIVE HUMUNGUS FAN ON AL THE BTX SYSTEMS!!!!!