Intel woos system builders with BTX, Linux

CHIP FIRM Intel has summoned European box-shifters for days of golf, Guinness and Irish dancing at a swanky country club in County Dublin, Ireland.

Between visits to a Guinness-powered establishment and sessions of golf in the Emerald hills, Intel is plugging its not-very-popular BTX box layout to system builders at its European Intel Solutions Summit, 2005.

The corporation is also taking time out to show how well Linux runs on boxes with Intel inside. Penguins are out in force, we learned, and the chipmaker together with Red Hat, is dishing out a disk informing integrators how easy it is to install the alternative operating system.

Gigabyte, we're told, showed off a BTX board based on Intel's 945 chipset.

Intel is also showing off a digital home, powered by a dual-core Pentium Extreme Edition chip, water cooled by Sanyo Denki. Slipped into the beast were a pair of GeForce 6600 GTs connected by bridge, though the drivers installed weren't able to demonstrate Nvidia's much hyped SLI on this Intel platform, say the French snoops at clubic.com.

Scheduled for later today is a booze-up at a Guinness Storehouse. And those system boys sure can drink. µ