Comment by keyringlight
4 months ago
MY likely-underinformed opinion is that the ATX form factor for building PCs is creaking at the seams for the generic '1x dGPU' specification, but there's a number of factors that work against a change to something substantially better. It'd need a number of companies to offer new product lines at the same time, probably incompatible with ATX and all the challenges that would bring.
It's not just the huge heatsinks to get rid of the heat output, the power input is another. Also while dGPUs are growing at the high end, low-end dGPUs seem under-served, while AMD have APUs that I think could make a lot of people very content they don't seem too eager to make them easy to get hold of, and intel have the building blocks for a similar product but are hesitant to providing something beyond the minimum
The popularity of the mini-ITX board size really shows this along with alternative mounting locations and risers for GPUs.
The old ATX power supply standard really needs to get phased out. I'm hopeful to see progress on ATX12VO become more common.
But even separate from that I see things like the Ryzen Z series opening even smaller devices while still offering a lot of graphical punch. I love the Z1 Extreme on my Legion Go, it's an awesome platform. And yeah, having that plus an external GPU could be cool but as noted it's $$$.
Intel proposed the BTX format [0]. Didn't catch on. ATX has a lot of momentum (including the related mATX, EATX, and so forth).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BTX_(form_factor)
I think BTX serves as the example for why a major change is unlikely, it's death is a warning to anyone thinking of doing the same. That said, even though it was led by intel back when they were in a much better position than they are now, I wonder if it wasn't against the background of Pentium4/"Preshott" and Athlon/Opteron would it have gone down better.
It's a shame as the only real personal computer desktop/tower maker that's exercised their freedom to make a significantly different design Apple with Mac Pros, and that's a different animal entirely.