For those of you that follow the motherboard market to some degree will have noticed that the Nehalem, sorry, Core i7 motherboards, look quite crowded. The ATX standard was introduced way back in 1995, that’s over a decade ago, and we have yet to see a real replacement for it. Sure, Intel tried with BTX, but it was an unwanted and now unnecessary standard as CPUs these days don’t require the kind of cooling that BTX was designed for.

At 305x244mm the ATX standard is way too small for today’s demands and even the wider EATX (305x330mm) standard seems to have problems with housing six memory slots. There are several problems with the Core i7/X58 platform that the humble ATX form factor can’t handle and we’re wondering what will be done to address these issues.

First of all, the new Core i7 CPUs are larger and have a bigger cooler which means that a larger area of the motherboard must be kept clear of components over a certain height to accommodate this. Secondly, the addition of an extra two memory slots means that there will be less space for edge mounted connecters, although with IDE on its final legs in high-end PCs, this might not be a major issue, but it still causes some problems when it comes to the power connectors.

Then there’s the expansion slots, most current motherboards are using six rather than seven slots and we’re not expecting to see a lot of X58 motherboards to have more than six usable slots, at least not if you expect to fit longer cards into all slots, as the chipset cooling is taking up valuable real estate on the motherboard. This is already a problem on some motherboards and will only get worse for the time being.

Considering that more and more graphics cards are using dual slot cooling solutions these days, not just the high-end cards, but some quite affordable mid-range cards with passive cooling also takes up two or even three slots, due to the pure bulk of the passive cooling solutions out there. PCIe cards might in many cases be smaller than PCI cards, but this isn’t always the case and we would expect to see more add-on cards using PCIe x4 interfaces as they become more common place on motherboards, which could result in larger cards.

We’re also curious about what the X58 motherboards with the nForce 200 chipset will look like, as not only does these chips run really hot, as seen on Intel’s Skulltrail motherboard, but depending on the implementation by the motherboard manufacturer, some motherboards will use a pair of these chips for full x16 PCIe performance. This requires a complicated chipset cooling solution and it will eat up even more space on the motherboard.

Although we’ve seen some attempts at creating new standards, like Foxconn’s 10 slot experimental motherboard, we need an industry wide change of the standard to something that is longer and wider today for high-end motherboards. It would be possible to use something like the WTX standard which measures 355.6x425.4mm, but this seems excessively large.

Of course a new motherboard standard would bring around another problem, none of today’s cases would work. However, we’re sure many of you would agree that a new case is a small cost if an improved industry wide motherboard standard could be developed. The only fly in the ointment that we can see right now is the fact that later next year, Intel will be moving to a single chipset solution on the Lynnfield and Havendale platforms and in this case, the ATX standard might once again be good enough.

However, AMD is also expected to adopt triple-channel memory at some stage in the future and a larger motherboard standard would benefit this as well. It would also make sense for a more affordable workstation standard, even for dual CPU systems, as today there are way too many different standards in this area of the market as well.

The biggest problem is that there needs to be a big push and it doesn’t seem like anyone is willing to do this push as of right now, but we have a feeling that we’ll run into some new issues in the near future if it’s not done sooner rather than later.