The reason BTX failed is that it didn't present compelling arguments for enthusiasts at the time. Were there high-end enthusiast-class BTX boards, comparable t

The reason BTX failed is that it didn't present compelling arguments for enthusiasts at the time. Were there high-end enthusiast-class BTX boards, comparable to the best ATX boards of the time? I don't recall seeing them in any numbers. Hell, even BTX cases from recognizable manufacturers are quite rare. It's obvious they were making the pitch to the largest OEMs, the Dells and Acers who can source their own cases and boards. And the sales pitch was most compelling for them. If you've got a roasting Pentium 4 and a modest graphics card, you can fit them in the BTX "cooling channel" and keep them at a frosty 95c with a dinky heatsink and one or two cheap fans. That's not really exciting to an audience already saying "I can spend $75 on a kilogram of heatsink to get my CPU down to 70c, or $200+ on a custom-loop watercooling setup and get to 45c". Maybe they needed to find a niche market for hobbyists to work with-- for example, the early "silent computing" crowd might have been more interested in marginal increases in cooling. After all, people are willing to consider other form factors when there's some compelling draw (see Mini-ITX) I also wonder if the original design thesis still holds up. Once the Core series came out, "how do we cool this angry CPU" became less of a fixation, so it was probably easier to switch back towards commodity ATX designs. On the other hand, we've shot back past the original thermal situation and then some-- would the design still hold up with an unlimited 7950X drawing ~250W and a 4090 drawing 400w all trying to exhaust it into the cooling channel, or would they bake each other to death? I do agree that today's GPUs are ridiculously long, and nonstandard designs make them difficult to manage. Given that most outward-facing drives are gone, and SSDs have replaced most spinning rust in enthusiast PCs, I wish we'd see more "flat desktop" style cases. The GPU isn't sagging because its weight is directed mostly straight down into the case's bracing, convection is probably a little better, but it doesn't really help the power nightmare. They always make the cheap photoshopped jokes about GPUs with mains power, but maybe that's a stopgap solution-- sell the 5090 with an external power brick supplying, say, 48V/12A, and there's no internal cable gore and the power system can be 48v everywhere it matters. Then there's no need to design the rest of the PSU to guess what nVidia will want tomorrow.