Motherboard Mini-DTX petition thread!

[jØrd]

at this point i'd settle for x8/x8

 

[nox]

Thinking about it, any mini-itx motherboard with a x16 pcie slot populated with a dual height gpu shoved in there takes up the same physical space as putting two x16 slots on the mini itx board, aka mini-dtx. however it would allow users the option of dual GPU, as long as one is single slot. Also i seem to remember DTX was invented to get the most efficient size motherboard per sheet of 'circuity board stuff' (or whatever the correct name is)

c'mon asrock! you can do it!

 

[jØrd]

it would allow users the option of dual GPU

In my case it would enable me to build out a system w/ a single slot GPU (iirc there are 1050Ti's & the 1070 Katana that are single slot) and throw in a 10Gb SFP+ / XFP NIC w/out having to use a bifurcation compatible mobo and riser or moving to a larger chassis (currently an ftz-03 mini) for my desktop. Maybe i will make my peace and end up w/ a beige Cerberus some time down the track instead though.

 

[SaperPL]

I'm digging this out because I realised recently that we might be at the perfect point in time to start asking for it from the manufacturers.

I've spent some time gathering what I know about this mDTX layout, what are the problems with it and what it would enable in one imgur post/album here (sorry for wall of text though)


TL;DR version:

1) Why now? Because I realised we have approached this from a wrong angle. We wanted separate line of boards to be mDTX and no vendor will do that. We need to have one of the tiers changed completely to mDTX instead of adding another variant to whole lineup.

Because on AM4 the X370/X470 SFF boards are not much different from B350/B450 right now and manufacturers have to ask higher price for them anyway. And we're going to have to have a successor for X470 next year for Zen2.

I think you won't want to put X470 board in inwin chopin or tacens ixion and you'll rather go with B350 or B450 board. So X370/X470 board being a two slot won't affect really those small single slotted cases/ones with no slot.

I think what we should ask for is X370/X470 SFF successor to be a dual slot mDTX board instead of mITX.

2) There's visualised explanation why it won't affect cases that have dual slot GPU support

3) There's visualised explanation why we won't have that for cases with single slot or no slots at all.

4) There are few layouts shown there:
- SLI water cooled layout in standard dual slot chassis with single slotted cards (with water blocks)
- SLI water cooled layout in horizontal/console sized chassis with single slotted cards (with water blocks)
- SLI setup with two dual slot cards parallel to the board
- few setups where you can mount M.2 drives in one of the slots.


If I wrote something dumb in there, let me know and I'll fix it. It's not set in stone


At this point I think we have enough small/indie case manufacturers here that if most of them would be interested in such thing, this could let us get through to the board vendors with this concept, as I think most of us have some contacts in the industry already.

Finally let me know what you think about such a change. Would that affect you? Would you be mad if manufacturers did such change while the mid range and low end boards remained mITX?

 

[confusis]

@SaperPL My M-DTX design(s) (the 3D rendered orange one you included) was based on official M-DTX dimensions I totally understand wanting the board shorter though. That board was designed during the Z77 chipset days - a lot has changed towards component integration since then!

https://smallformfactor.net/articles/editorial/opinion-m-dtx-ultimate-sff-motherboard

Yup, it followed the horrific CPU socket location of the contemporary boards at the time :/

 

[Phuncz]

I would love to see mDTX just for the choice that it offers. For cases that have 3 slots for GPU like the Ncase M1 it would allow a dedicated capture card for streamers, professional users could use the ASRock Ultra Quad M.2 PCIe card and a workstation GPU. VR gamers can use the PCIe card that is required for wireless gaming or use the extra room for a beefier CPU cooler.

But it was never for what we think it's good for, but how many Upper Management expects to sell.

 

[GuilleAcoustic]

Professional CAD users could have a single slot Quadro for modeling and a dual slot Tesla/Titan for offloaded rendering.

 

[Kmpkt]

I wonder what the dev cost would be to go directly to someone like @ASRock System and have a Mini-DTX board designed from the ground up on contract.

 

[Windfall]

I wonder what the dev cost would be to go directly to someone like @ASRock System and have a Mini-DTX board designed from the ground up on contract.

Tens of Thousands, probably.

 

[SaperPL]

@SaperPL My M-DTX design(s) (the 3D rendered orange one you included) was based on official M-DTX dimensions I totally understand wanting the board shorter though. That board was designed during the Z77 chipset days - a lot has changed towards component integration since then!

Yup, it followed the horrific CPU socket location of the contemporary boards at the time :/

Yeah, I knew that, but It was actually the only concept model you are seeing over and over when looking for mini DTX apart from photo mockups. And it feels like because of that people don't get that the main idea is to not make problems for already existing cases.

But it was never for what we think it's good for, but how many Upper Management expects to sell.

I think that the only reason we don't have stuff like this so far is that there's some limitation on how many high end chipsets they can get for each generation compared to mid range and low end while they also have to get some minimum amount of sales for each variant of the product to offload expenses for packaging/boxes/separate assembly lines etc.

Go and check how many various random 'mDTX' variants with PCIe x1+x16 gigabyte and asrock have in their portfolio. Sometimes it's like 4 similar boards with same chipset differentiated by lan/audio/sata chipsets. If they can do stuff like this, then they can do this format of the board and making a separate high-end lineup is not looking like a problem of "we can only do one variant per chipset/layout".

Professional CAD users could have a single slot Quadro for modeling and a dual slot Tesla/Titan for offloaded rendering.

I see an even better example than this - get a low profile radeon for your living room gaming SFF rig attached to a freesync TV (lookup running freesync on geforece videos).

I wonder what the dev cost would be to go directly to someone like @ASRock System and have a Mini-DTX board designed from the ground up on contract.

I feel like this would be the first point on a roadmap to having this board manufactured. The question is if we get the quotation from them, can we somehow fund a prototype batch that we would then send to reviewers and not "hug" for ourselves.

Because making prototype run for single generation just for us right now doesn't move anything forward and if we can't do anything with that batch, then it would convince board vendors even more that it's not worth trying.

Tens of Thousands, probably.

Not necessarily. If you check out the portfolio of asrock and gigabyte, you'll see they have made boards of this format already, so essentially this is a question on how much of design work for PCB is needed to make a bifurcated route to the second slot. Cheapest way would be making a prototype that has hard wired x8 for each slot so 8 lanes originally for the first slot just get past it, but I'm not sure how much of additional work is required to handle bifurcation for that.

Anyway I think that bare prototype itself should not cost astronomical amounts. It's the work required to design the circuits what could blow this idea out.

 

[GuilleAcoustic]

Shuttle has been using DTX boards in their barebones for years (the 240mm wide ones, with 4x DIMM).

I approached them but they do not sell the motherboard alone.

 

[SaperPL]

Shuttle has been using DTX boards in their barebones for years (the 240mm wide ones, with 4x DIMM).

I approached them but they do not sell the motherboard alone.

The problem with those is that they are not backward compatible with cases that are made for mITX like dual slot mDTX. The length here is huge issue because you will have just a few cases that actually make sense for it.

Also Dell had some slim PCs using similar form factor boards.

 

[Necere]

The Shuttle boards aren't technically DTX, as they are quite a bit deeper. DTX is the same depth as ATX/mATX (244mm), but you can see the difference compared to mATX:

Mounting holes don't match the ATX standard either.

 

[GuilleAcoustic]

The Shuttle boards aren't technically DTX, as they are quite a bit deeper. DTX is the same depth as ATX/mATX (244mm), but you can see the difference compared to mATX:

Mounting holes don't match the ATX standard either.

Oh gosh, never realized that. My dreams are shattered T.T

 

[Necere]

Sort of related, ASRock has produced boards they call "Extended Mini-ITX," which are close to mDTX. While the exact specs of these boards aren't ideal (it's a little wider compared to mDTX), just the name of the form factor would probably be easier to market to less informed consumers due to it's clear relationship to mini-ITX, vs. the almost completely unknown (and "dead") DTX form factor.

 

[SaperPL]

Well, gigabyte still makes the correct size for this:

Asrock makes those slightly bigger in the other dimension as well though:

Btw, I wish I had bought this board/barbone when it still was floating on the ebay:

I've got the CPUs and memory for this laying around ;p

 

[Windfall]

Well, gigabyte still makes the correct size for this:

Asrock makes those slightly bigger in the other dimension as well though:

Btw, I wish I had bought this board/barbone when it still was floating on the ebay:

I've got the CPUs and memory for this laying around ;p

I want that dual socket board.

 

[Kmpkt]

I feel like this would be the first point on a roadmap to having this board manufactured. The question is if we get the quotation from them, can we somehow fund a prototype batch that we would then send to reviewers and not "hug" for ourselves.

Because making prototype run for single generation just for us right now doesn't move anything forward and if we can't do anything with that batch, then it would convince board vendors even more that it's not worth trying.

I think the way to make this happen would be to compile a selection of compatible cases, build hype around the format and then crowd source.

 

[SaperPL]

I think the way to make this happen would be to compile a selection of compatible cases, build hype around the format and then crowd source.

Yeah, this as well.

I've posted this on reddit also to gauge how people see this and from comments it feels like people are sceptic about the selling points of such board, especially the SLI + Watercooling being something that people discard as valid selling point right away.

I want this to happen for horizontal layout with additional pci-e slot for M.2 nvme drives ( I know I could just bifurcate this, but I want one riser for 90 degree mount as well), but it feels like there should be a quite a few other layouts apart from SLI in what's already there.

 

[Kmpkt]

Just to be clear, this board would allow for 2 x GPUs with single slot water coolers in an SFF format, correct? Alternatively a standard double slot GPU as well as a single slot PCIe card (ie. capture, sound, etc)?