We’ve taken a look at ASUS’s BTF form factor in our CES coverage from earlier this year as it joined the other “look ma, no wires” club for selling motherboards, GPUs and cases as a bundle that makes wire management a thing of the past. For the most part, the offerings have been fairly bland – mostly bundles available from the major manufacturers and the occasional case maker that claims support for the standards. Of course, this doesn’t solve the whole ecosystem issue of having three competing standards where industry-level cooperation would be more likely to advance something meaningful – otherwise, we’ll be headed towards another Intel BTX (Ed: That article is old enough to drink!) or ATX12VO boondoggle that no one gets around to adopting (Ed: ATX12VO isn’t dead yet!).
Moving forward to present time, at Computex this year, we first stumbled through Cooler Master’s booth and saw a lovely briefcase looking concept case that I’d be proud to take to a LAN party as my gaming rig, so we had to find out a bit more. As it turns out, ASUS is commissioning a few case makers to create some innovative concept cases that work with its BTF form factor that show off things that would not necessarily be possible. Cooler Master delivered a couple of options with the one I’ve dubbed the “BTF Briefcase” due to its handle on the top being the most interesting of the two. As you can see, it features an ASUS ROG STRIX RTX 4090 BTF GPU (the most common GPU used to show off how really large GPUs can fit inside of cases, because if this one fits, anything fits).
Of course, we had to see what made it tick – surely there was not a BTX motherboard hiding in there, so we had to disassemble it a bit to see what made it tick. The GPU was enclosed in the frame on the top which snapped into the main base of the case which helped to solve logistical issues. As it turns out, a BTF connector was fabricated to allow for the connection of the power “fingers” to the PSU and a basic PCIe right angle extension was used to for the data connection.
On the inside we found one a MSI Z790I EDGE WIFI (Ed: ASUS commissioned this, right?), an Intel 14900K (Ed: That’s a bit toasty for that cooler) and a Cooler Master V SFX GOLD 850W PSU. Quite frankly, that’s a pretty stout configuration in such a small form factor that shows off your GPU like a museum piece.
There were three other ASUS commissioned BTF cases that we found at Computex – the first next door to the “BTX Briefcase” that was a modified Cooler Master NR200 that put the GPU on display and then another pair of cases at the ASUS booth that display the ASUS ROG STRIX RTX 4090 BTF GPU in various ways.
In summary, it’s good to see some innovation in the BTF/zero wire world as at some point, it may become the leading way forward for us to build our rigs. For now, it still seems to be heavily targeted at system integrators that are building higher volume of similar-spec’ed machines instead of a true custom PC experience.