[citation][nom]wearl[/nom]Well duh, its a BTX case. that is what BTX was designed for. BTX was made for better airflow for the Pentium D series because those CPUs run very very hot. The Pentium D was the Prescott P4 but put 2 Dies on one chip and link them together to make a dual core. Hottest CPUs ever Made.[/citation]
BTX (unfortunately in my opinion) died with the PD processors. It was not only an alignment of the case fans with the mobo fans, it also put the cpu, northbridge, and card slots in a line so that all of your major heat generating components were able to get maximum airflow. Things like ram, headers and rear IO shield were moved to the top of the board for easier access to fat fingers like mine. Power supplies and disc drives also made a line at either the top or bottom of the case for easier cooling as well (most power supplies used in BTX cases had a fan on the front/back of the supply instead of the bottom of the supply like we see today). Lastly BTX cases were mounted on the left side of the case instead of the right. I'm not sure though if that was part of the standard, or if that was just the popular way to do it to visually differentiate themselves from 90% of the ATX cases out there.
This is just an EATX case that takes an ATX mobo and better aligns the fans and the case while mounting it 'upside down' on the left side of the case. Still a good case, but hardly groundbreaking compared to other offerings available today.
BTX is not needed today for the sake of heat dissipation, but I would love to see it come back for the sake of visual appeal. The bulk of the headers and connectors are on the top of the board, instead of just everywhere like they are on ATX. Most GPUs and other ad-on cards have some amount of artwork on the right side of the card... which normally faces down in an ATX case, and makes it harder to see. In a BTX (or left mounted case in general) such artwork faces up where you can see it. Also, by facing up the heat is better drawn away from the card. Having all of your interesting components (cpu, gpu, and mobo heat spreaders for mosfets and northbridge) in a line also means you can do easier and more interesting lighting, or smaller windows that still show off your stuff. I don't know, maybe it is a form factor that is an electrical engineer's nightmare, but it seemed like a step forward to me, and I was sad to see it die off.