AMD DTX Specification For Small Form Factor PCs

Internal Impressions

To open the chassis, there are two thumbscrews to unfasten on the backside of the reference system. Once both screws are loose, lay the computer down flat (do not stand it up like a tower). With those thumb screws toward the top, press with your thumbs against the two top corners (black part) of the case to slide the top forward approximately one or two centimeters. The top will then lift off and you can see that the reference system has a full size Seagate Barracuda SATA desktop hard drive and a Toshiba notebook DVD-ROM. The power supply is an Enhance ENP-2725J , which is a 250W hard drive. Just 250 Watts you say?

The AMD DTX reference motherboard (Diamond 2) features the tried and true AMD 690G chipset with a 45W Athlon X2 Dual-Core Processor BE-2350 processor and 2GB of DDR2 667MHz memory.

Since this motherboard chipset uses a low amount of power and the processor is only 45W there really is no reason to have a larger power supply. Actually ,250W might be over-kill as you will find out here in a bit.

If you noticed the foam around the stock AMD Processor-In-a-Box (PIB) heat sink that is because the air intake is designed to bring in air from the ‘outer chassis’, which is cooler.

Since the reference motherboard didn’t have any IDE headers on it a IDE/SATA bridge was needed to convert the IDE DVD-ROM to SATA.

The front panel reference card is called the CARAT 1 and if you look close you can see a bunch of ‘rework’ was done to get it functional for the first batch of prototypes. Since both the DIAMOND 2 and CARAT 1 are works in progress they aren’t going to be given the standard benchmarks we run here at LR. Benchmarks will be exactly what you would expect from an AMD-690G motherboard with integrated graphics and a 2.1GHz dual-core Athlon X2 CPU Nothing new here other than the form factor!