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DIY-APE has reached an important milestone in developing the back-plug ecosystem for PC DIYers. BTF3.0 (via Uniko's Hardware) is designed so that no cabling is needed between your PSU, motherboard, or graphics card, reducing cable management for supremely clean builds. The DIY-APE team shared some information and video footage of the various new components working together and separately on Chinese social media.
As a gentle reminder, DIY-APE’s BTF designs have previously been adopted by important PC component makers like Asus and MSI. BTF designs seek to reduce cable clutter by putting connectors around the back and favoring direct cable-less connections between components. We’ve seen some great examples of previous BTF builds at trade shows, but it is taking time to penetrate the market. Hopefully, with some upcoming generation of new processors/platforms, BTF will become mainstream.
Now that BTF3.0 has been finalized, what does it promise? The new BTF3.0 motherboard has an up to 1,500W 50-pin header, which replaces the traditional or dual-8-pin EPS connectors for the CPU and the 24-pin connector for motherboard power.
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To match the motherboard, which was a prototype Z890 chipset model from Colorful, the DIY-APE team had an Asus graphics card like the TX Gaming RTX 4070 12G-BTF, with the firm’s neat GC-HPWR connector. The (up to) 1,500W from the motherboard will be fed through this connector (and the PCIe slot) to the GPU, which sounds ample. It also would put an end to GPU power cable melting woes.
Another essential component of this milestone setup is the PSU. However, we don’t know what vendor this component was. In the embedded video, towards the end, you will hear it satisfyingly clunk into place to power the mobo and GPU. It's a shame they couldn't get one to match the motherboard and GPU, but that's nitpicking.
With these three major components and equipping M.2 rather than SATA SSDs (there are four M.2 slots on the sample Mini ATX board pictured), all a PC DIYer should need to wire up are the CPU cooler, system fans, RGB cabling, and front panel connectors.
Lastly, the DIY-APE folks and Uniko shared some information about cases. Different case makers use different mobo tray thicknesses and cutouts, which can impact how things connect, and requiresome design/build workarounds. In other words, cases and component makers must follow more rigorous standards before BTF3.0 or a similar standard becomes a mass-market standard.
We look forward to the clean BTF future but wouldn’t like to bet on when BTF PC DIY becomes mainstream.
