Of course, it's one thing to know the theory behind how new technologies can be connected together on a motherboard, but it's another to know where you're going to Tomato Slicer manufacturers physically pop your processor, memory and expansion cards. That's handled by the ATX specification, now up to version 2.2. Despite being incredibly dull, it's vitally important and specifies crucial things such as: what size the motherboard can be, where mounting holes are located, power connections, power levels, physical positioning of components, color of connections and so on. Boring maybe, but if vendors decided they'd put these things wherever they liked, it'd be chaos.Despite being around since 1996, ATX has staved off multiple attempted coups, including BTX, introduced by Intel in 2003 mostly as a result of the soaring power output of the old P4.
It offered optimized airflow, a larger heatsink and motherboard area with dedicated low-profile designs. But as the P4 faded, any justification for the increased costs of BTX became extinct as well.We're seeing ever-increasing drives to lower power consumption and increase efficiency: laptop motherboards use technology that can reduce idle Northbridge power to below 1W, though an entire running desktop system board will suck at least 40W idle, compared to the 10-20W for an entire laptop.
The VIA mini-desktop ITX motherboards strike a balance on this front, usually consuming 10-15W in idle and usually less than 20W under full load, but that's hardly ever going to be a realistic choice for the gamer or anyone else that wants to perform other intensive tasks.Part of the problem is just power regulation, that's pulling the 12v line down to around 1.5v for the processor. Much like PSU efficiency, motherboards have the same problem. Much noise is made about multi-phase voltage regulators: while we're sure they do smooth the voltage in technical terms, they seem to have little real effect. Similarly, new energy regulation modules such as the Gigabyte DES or Asus EPU claim to regulate voltages and perhaps clock speeds more efficiently.