BTX (form factor)

BTX (for Balanced Technology eXtended) is a form factor for motherboards, originally intended to be the replacement for the aging ATX motherboard form factor. It was designed in late 2004 and early 2005 to alleviate issues that arose from using the newer technologies of the time (which demanded more power and created more heat) on motherboards compliant with the ATX specification that dated from 1995. The ATX and BTX standards were both proposed by Intel. However, future development of BTX retail products by Intel was canceled in September 2006 following Intel's decision to refocus on low-power CPUs after suffering scaling and thermal issues with the Pentium 4. The first company to implement BTX was Gateway Inc, followed by Dell and MPC. The first generation of Apple's Mac Pro used some elements of the BTX design system as well, but was not BTX-compliant, instead using a proprietary form factor.