Micro ATX to ATX adapter?

[TheGreatSatan]

I've been building PC's for about 8 years now and never knew about these. I cracked open a Dell 8200 that uses RDRAM and discovered this ATX extension. It's made by Foxconn and turns a Micro ATX to [standard] ATX. It adds two more PCI slots to the board.

http://i406.photobucket.com/albums/pp143/TheGreatSatan/P1030490.jpg

http://i406.photobucket.com/albums/pp143/TheGreatSatan/P1030491.jpg

[rithunder916]

yes, I've seen these a few times, the only issue is that they tend not to work well for anything but basic things. I've tried running pci video cards and the basic low end models work fine, but the higher end stuff doesn't work well at all. Hp uses the same things in their pc's.

[mtekk]

I've seen micro ATX boards with the connector for that expander board, but not the whole thing. It saves on production costs I guess, only one board for ATX and micro ATX, just the cost for an add-on for ATX.

Intel did a similar thing with the D865GBF ATX board and its micro ATX sibling (they are essentially the same board, but the full ATX is just wider for the three extra PCI slots (no other components on the extra PCB material so you get a odd large green area with no interruptions)).

[nevermind1534]

Dell used these daughterboards a lot. The full size computers would have a daughter board, the slim ones would have a PCI riser with 2 slots (why the PCI slot on the board looks wierd). I have 3 slim Optiplex GX150s and one full tower, and that is exactly what they did.

[FuzzyPlushroom]

I've seen micro ATX boards with the connector for that expander board, but not the whole thing. It saves on production costs I guess, only one board for ATX and micro ATX, just the cost for an add-on for ATX.

So have I! I never knew what they were before now; always wondered if they had some bizarre clustering purpose. When I saw the thread title, I was expecting one of those metal pieces that allow you to mount a mATX PSU in a standard PSU bay, but this is even cooler than that. (Because that's not cool at all.)

[nevermind1534]

When I only had the slimlines, I was also wondering what the contacts were until I saw the PCI daughterboard on the mid tower.

[chaksq]

Reminds me of the crud LPX boards from the mid 90s that had all the expansion slots on a daughter board which could be exchanged for either a tower or desktop setup. Besides no inter compatibility between manufactures the boards were horrible for cooling and weakened when using faster more powerful expansion cards. See my project highrise for an example of a former LPX case. While this seems like a cool novelty you are really just limiting yourself.