What does ATX mean exactly, you almost sound like it’s not an actual tower-based solution?
Thank god someone brought this up. A piece of shit from Walmart is not the same as an hp z or a Dell precision. Professional workstations last for years, are fully upgradable and come with 3 year ON SITE warranties. They cost about as much as an apple product, but you get better specs overall and they are fully upgradable and very well built.
In a years time everything will be different, people will be faced with a new set of choices and challenges as technology and companies evolve. Somebody will start a thread just like this one, a few will respond stoically other will have moved on to new horizons and not feel the need to respond.
I’m happy with my recent choices. i see no conspiracy, just people being diverse in their response to a situation. Diversity is healthy for any community.
ATX is a motherboard configuration, short for “Advanced Technology Extended”, X is used instead of the E. What it stands for isnt really important though. Its just the most conventional and standardized config for a motherboard layout.
Saying something is tower based is misleading because a “tower” is just the form factor of the case itself. Cases which hold the internals (including the ATX motherboards) come in all shapes and sizes. So its a bit weird to call something a tower based solution when the tower isnt really the solution or the limitation, its just choice in container.
You can actually build a computer without a case as well, some people have built them into their desks, or mounted them on walls. Some cases like the AeroCool Strike X are designed more like a mini-shelving unit. Some of my personal favorites are those in cube form via the micro-atx configuration. You can see such cases here and here for example. Via mini-itx you can get stuff like this and unique options like this. In short, its a literal sandbox of options when it comes to form factor… so much so that case modding is a pretty hefty segment of PC computer building. I mean you even have people putting mini-itx motherboards in things like the nintendo gamecube or a bottle of Jack Daniels.
