IMO this is overstated a bit. ATX works well enough it’s unclear when its limitations will become sufficiently severe to prompt significant conversion to an alternate form factor which resolves them. There’s a some CPU+DDR in the middle workstation and server hardware but the most popular ATX alternative, ITX SFF, goes the opposite direction.
I figure something’ll happen to disrupt ATX eventually but what and when isn’t apparent to me.
Every sizeable-ish corporation I’ve worked for has had a 3-5 year hardware refresh cycle. The large OEMs (Dell, HP, Lenovo) try to generate sales by pushing for three, their buyers usually push back some. But with more then half the places I’ve worked policy’s been any significant hardware failure past the three year OEM warranty’s triggered whole machine replacement.
All the office hardware’s been ATX. Nowhere I’ve worked has deployed workstations, blower GPUs, or dedicated render/high compute servers. In most cases the office spaces and buildings couldn’t support the power density for much of a roll out anyways. Some places have also had rackmount servers, some haven’t, some have run a mix of rack, tower, and other stuff.
Where I work at the moment top of the GPU stack is 7900 XTX and 4080. Can’t do 4090 because there’s a fire safety ban on them and, if that were lifted, most locations would require building upgrades. But 7600 [XT], 4060 [Ti], and 7700 XT are borderline overkill most of the time. Generally we favor cards where it’s a one time RGB disable but there’s a few that need OpenRGB.
Some do, some don’t. Across enthusiast forums like this one I’d say it’s roughly even splits between lit and non-lit builds and between cost conscious and wanting to spend money on higher quality parts. Fishtanks have been trendy for product launches lately but are somewhat uncommon in the parts lists people post. There’s maybe two or three times as many threads for cases with metal on both sides.
Sales volumes would be better data to go by, but those aren’t hardly ever disclosed.
I’m curious who actually buys the Sneaker X, which seems to be selling in higher volume than the Shark X.
