ATX Form Factor?

As we all know, the ATX form factor for motherboards has been around quite a few years.

Then we got the "mATX" or micro ATX, I suppose that's what it means?

Well, I am sitting here on a wet Sunday afternoon, assembling a full ATX form factor tower machine.

The MoBo is a Gigabyte Z77D3H and looks to be the usual decent design that I am used to from Gigabyte for their inexpensive products.

It is intended for Core-i processors, and this one has an i-5 3570K, which is the third generation "Ivy Bridge".

Intel supplied a stock cooling solution with the processor, but unbeknown to me, Gigabyte had a promotion going with this board and I received a cooling solution about half the size of a house-brick! :eek:

So, I am looking at the board and figure that with the 92mm fan in place the Arctic Cooling Professional 7 (Rev.2) will just about clear the G-Skill Ripjaws memory sticks.

But what is this weird mounting between the processor and the first PCI-E 3.0 slot?

"mSATA Intel Smart Response Technology" wtf? :confused:

Some sort of new SSD tech it would seem ($300 for 256GB)?

Now..........to the point of this post (at last:D)

The cooler will certainly eclipse this mSATA mounting, just as a decent video card will eclipse two of the three PCI x1 slots, and a second card would eclipse one of the two PCI slots............

Perhaps it is time to look at a "megaATX" format? as there just doesn't seem to be enough room on the current form factor?

Well I have had major issues with my machine.

Pretty standard except for the GFX card, it went over the ram and started attacking the hard drives.

To be honest, I have seen some new designs for the case where they split up the hard drives and make abit more space for a new GFX card. However it wont make a diff if its going over your expansion slots so yeah, maybe we need a new design :)

I picked up a CASECOM case for £28, not the cheapest, but less than the bigger names.

The build is pretty robust and the design is rather interesting.

The PSU is mounted at the bottom of the case opposite the 5x SDD/HDD bays. The drives mount sideways in a no tools required setup. There is a 120mm front case fan that sucks air in over the drive bays and the top mounted 120mm PSU fan sucks it down and out.

In the middle are 2x 3.5" external bays. One has a card reader and the other is empty..........this is where a video card might intrude, so there is actually plenty of room (I hope ........ I only ordered the HD6870 last night :D)

Above that there are 3x 5.25" bays and one internal one.

So the case configuration is OK it's just the MoBo, and they all seem to be pretty much the same?

One neat touch I will give Gigabyte credit for is that a large video card will eclipse two of the SATA ports............they have mounted those two sideways to avoid this problem :cool:

This is a full ATX form factor and has 3x PCI-E x1 and two PCI slots but if you mounted two video cards you would lose 2 PCI-E and one PCI. But you will still have paid for them.

I suppose that one solution would be liquid cooling but that is still rather costly? Otherwise there are the integrated CPU/MoBo solutions, but I don't think that they are mature enough as yet for really graphics intensive requirements.

Like yourself, I have had problems with the video card and RAM, which is why I tend to steer clear of the cheaper ASUS MoBos, unless I know that how the system is built is how it is going to stay.

Well im selling my machine and getting a laptop so ill be out of the loop :).

Glad to see you go for Ati, although I would of gotten a 6850 and just flashed to 6870 :P

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Glad to see you go for Ati, although I would of gotten a 6850 and just flashed to 6870 :P

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Please remember that a 6850 is not an underclocked 6870. What you suggest is just a quick and nasty (easy?) overclock technique.

If your 6850 is already factory overclocked then it will have little effect other than to perhaps screw things up. A better result can always be obtained by manually overclocking as you need to tweak the voltages a little ;) however, as we know, that takes time and patience, so the flash is a quick and relatively failsafe method.

Also............you can go on to clock the 6870..................:D

I mostly use ATI/AMD because they are pretty good value for money over here. I do have some cheap NVIDIA cards that work with onboard NVIDIA chipsets (ASRock MoBos).......... they actually combine using SLI and outperform a more expensive ATI card on those boards. Not by much, but the cards are half the price!

OH! I found an NVIDIA card from back in the day.....GeForce4 Ti4600........it probably cost 3 times what I just paid for the ATI............ I noticed that it had all solid state capacitors...........very rare for back then :)