Intel is playing chess, AMD is playing draughts - Financial analyst quoted in WSJ
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DAAMIT bores with DTX non-starter
AS IF THERE WEREN'T quite enough form factors around, AMD has launched a new one which it has dubbed, innovatively, DTX.
That marks yet another form factor for major PC manufacturers to ignore, as DTX prepares to join the ranks of BTX in all its different guises (well, except Dell), WTX and mini-ITX, eschewed by all but specialist builders.
If you're interested in some eye candy, have a look here.
Nobody quite knows what DTX is supposed to be for. That is to say, AMD says it should be a standards-based replacement for proprietary small form factor board sizes.
But is anyone really crying out for these things? After all, most people simply equate SFF with 'Shuttle', and for everyone else, there's Micro-ATX.
In an aping of Intel's BTX effort, DTX includes both 'full' DTX and 'mini' DTX which have different board sizes. Haven't we heard this all before?
The DTX spec appears to bring nothing new to the table, bar some compatibility with ATX which, to us, seems contradictory in purpose if not actual physical reality. Chalk this one up for another veto by the Taiwanese board-making mafia, then. µ
Tags: Amd
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DTX is about minimizing manure factoring costs, and avoiding that companies lock them self in to just one case vendor.
We build custom clusters out of microATX boards for cost reasons. The standard 9.6" square is a pain in the neck as two side by side boards are wider than a 19" rack. Yes, some uATX come in thinner versions but they are not standard.

A low cost DTX board will be great for us and also open up a world of options for vendors to do side by side systems in standard racks at better price points. I can see lots of opportunities for smart vendors to build dense _inexpensive_ rack solutions.
With the low height of the examples I wonder if the people that dream of a tweakable notebook might not be getting closer to their dream.
It certainly seem the formfactors start to run in notebook problems, I recall the fist prototype had the heatsink stick out over the top and they could not even close the case.
The DTX size illustrations using a full-ATX Asus motherboard are wrong. The DTX board's length SHOULD end at the middle of an ATX board's third slot as illustrated, but that comparison is only valid on 7-slot boards. The board in the picture is a 6-slot board, the TOP slot is missing, so the cuttoff line was drawn one slot too far to the left.

DTX has two slots and no empty slot possitions, wheras the illustration board has an empty slot position.
I think DTX is where the industry is headed for HTPC and desktops for business. It wouldn't hurt to have it on my desk at home, either. With so much integrated onto the mainboard these days, unless we're going for Crossfire or SLI we don't need all the slots offered by ATX.

Micro-ATX is okay, but I want to go smaller. However, I want to stick with desktop memory, not laptop, and I want a conventional multicore CPU and a mainstream graphics card. Plus, I want the case to be independent of the monitor, so no all-in-one solutions for me.

If DTX boards and cases were in the market, I'd buy one today.
I disagree and strongly recommend anyone reading this http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/amds-new-dtx-form-factor.ars to anyone interested in SFF, or simply silent PCs.
The purpose of DTX is to reduce production costs for the motherboard manufacturers. Instead of being able to produce 4 boards per (wafer?) they can do 6. Does that cut costs significantly? I have no idea.