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  • HiTechObsessed - Friday, October 17, 2014 - link

    Should be a big hit with console users. That lower frame-rate for gaming should be super-cinematic then!
  • XZerg - Friday, October 17, 2014 - link

    The power consumption delta is something I do not like. I rather see the idle and load instead. The idle tells me how much my "nas/htpc" system will consume while doing nothing. the load tells me what is the absolute worse it will consume. this allows me to weigh the options better on power consumption basis, not the delta as that's not what is going to matter when the system is going to be idling for prolonged periods.
  • looncraz - Friday, October 17, 2014 - link

    +1

    In this light, one extra watt for the faster performing (barely, but true, and much more so in gaming) 25W AMD option looks to be the real winner. Cheaper, only an extra watt of power used (in the delta measure anyway), etc... But, in the real world, the AMD may idle at 16W and the intel will idle at 8W... which may matter if planning on running multiple systems and using UPS protection such as in an office/school/government environment.
  • jospoortvliet - Friday, October 17, 2014 - link

    Good news is that most reviews I've seen put the AMD at a lower idle power than the Intel. The total load is closer than the difference graph makes it look, no idea why those are used...
  • maco - Friday, October 17, 2014 - link

    Agreed, I'd like to see idle and load graphs too. I tend to leave a computer on doing light server tasks, so idle power is an important metric for me.
  • danzig - Saturday, October 18, 2014 - link

    Same here concerning the power graphs. If there is a revision or edit of the page, could you please put more power consumption info up, if you have the data?
  • KWIE - Monday, October 20, 2014 - link

    I use mine as a NAS also, with FreeNAS/Plex. I haven't clocked it yet higher than 19W.
  • Guspaz - Monday, October 20, 2014 - link

    Agreed the delta numbers are useless. A system with an idle/load power consumption of 10W/20W would show up the same in the chart as a system with an idle/load power consumption of 500/510W, as admittedly contrived as that scenario is. But something like 10/20 versus 20/30 isn't so crazy.
  • Guspaz - Monday, October 20, 2014 - link

    Also, the graph says "lower is better", but that's not true at all. Given two processors with equal load power draw, the processor with the lower idle power draw "wins" that benchmark, but that means you want the processor with the *BIGGER* delta, not the smaller delta!
  • AJSB - Friday, October 17, 2014 - link

    AMD AM1 APUs based on Kabini simply CRUSH these abortions as for light gaming goes (and BTW, 1280x1024 is near 30% more pixels than of a 1366x768 monitor)....wait for AMD Beema AM1 ;)
  • Flunk - Friday, October 17, 2014 - link

    Yes, but that's like comparing a man with two broken legs to a man with no legs. Yes, the man with the broken legs is faster, but neither is going to be competing in any footraces anytime soon. These are not really suitable for PC gaming.

    Slap the two of them into tablets and the AMD will run Candy Crush better, but this is the desktop and neither can really manage anything on that level.
  • AJSB - Friday, October 17, 2014 - link

    I said *LIGHT* gaming....i also specified a certain resolution up to 1366x768 (forget about 1920x1080).

    It all depends the kind of titles it plays....many indies will play just fine...and so it will MANY of the "old" titles like CoH (NOT CoH2), CoD2, BF2,etc. at those resolutions....lot's of people still play at least CoD2 online (and doesn't have those crazy UAV/HELIs in MP) and theres lots of mods for CoH and BF2 to play online or offline (i actually prefer play those offline).

    Having said so, i play with a A6-5400K OC to 4GHz w/ iGPU OC to 950MHz and 8GB RAM at 2133MHz (CPU, iGPU and RAM were all undervolted to cut temps and power drain).
    This rig gives me more freedom to play more demanding titles that i doubt a AM1 could.
  • PICman - Friday, October 17, 2014 - link

    As usual, good review. However, as XZerg pointed out, the lack of idle and load power consumption is a problem. It's not just power consumption, but also heat generation and cooling. I guess the tests were run with a high wattage power supply, making idle power measurements meaningless?

    Non-working USB 3.0 ports is a big issue for me, also.
  • Torpe - Friday, October 17, 2014 - link

    How well do these chips do with Quick Sync for Handbrake?
  • Devo2007 - Saturday, October 18, 2014 - link

    Did you read the part that mentioned these are the B3-stepping processors that don't have QuickSync?
  • abufrejoval - Tuesday, October 21, 2014 - link

    My GIGABYTE J1900N-D3V wasn't properly informed about that "fact" and just runs QuickSync anyway... Actually the initial Intel chipset drivers didn't enable QuickSync and I was quite hopping mad, because ARK had reported QuickSync support for the J1900, irrespective of the stepping.

    Actually I believe that the QuickSync feature gap lies between the J1850 and the J1900 and isn't stepping dependent.
  • abufrejoval - Tuesday, October 21, 2014 - link

    Need edit!

    Fortgot to mention: It's a B3 stepping and runs around 80 frames/sec of DVD to MP4 conversion using DVDFab9 using QS. The QuickSync enabled Handbrake nightly builds I tried produced faulty output and the last stable release doesn't yet support QS.

    Batch video conversion isn't exactly the forte of this device, but it would make it a credible Plex server once QS support for encoding is built in (for devices that need the run-time conversion).
  • Torpe - Tuesday, October 21, 2014 - link

    Thanks for the answer.
  • BillyONeal - Friday, October 17, 2014 - link

    Windows 7 needs USB 3 drivers because Win7 has no USB 3 support. That was added in Win8.
  • nathanddrews - Friday, October 17, 2014 - link

    "Readers of our motherboard review section will have noted the trend in modern motherboards to implement a form of MultiCore Enhancement / Acceleration / Turbo on their motherboards."

    It's funny the difference between what turbo means today vs what it meant 30 years ago. My first PC (running Geo-DOS) had a "TURBO" button on the case that slowed it down. LOL

    I've been using a Windows 8.1 (Bing) tablet with an Atom Z3735D and it's really impressive. It plays UT99 and Halo CE flawlessly at max res and settings (1280x800) and can stream games over Steam IHS. I played Halo for four hours nonstop and still had 30% battery left.
  • Factory Factory - Friday, October 17, 2014 - link

    I recently bought the ASRock J1900-ITX for a cheap NAS/HTPC/Steam Home Streaming build, and I have to say I'm really pleased with it. It seemed like a great midpoint between the Gigabyte and Asus boards here: visual BIOS with fan controls, two USB 3.0 ports in back plus a header, DVI and HDMI both, ALC892 with optical audio out, and - this was big for the NAS part - two extra ASMedia SATA ports and a PCIe x1 slot. I stuck another ASMedia-based SATA card in the PCIe slot and shoved the whole thing in a Bitfenix Prodigy with a bunch of drives.

    I almost went with an AM1 build, but I knew that all my media and SHS worked fine with my Bay Trail tablet, and an Athlon 5350 and ASRock AM1H-ITX just didn't seem compelling at $50 more for the set (or even $25 more for an AM1B-ITX) and extra power consumption.
  • jospoortvliet - Saturday, October 18, 2014 - link

    Note that unless you load you system all the time, the AM1 might actually have saved you power - idle is lower in most tests than Intel.
  • abufrejoval - Tuesday, October 21, 2014 - link

    Could you please add AM1 idle power figures?

    I've measured 10Watt idle power behind the Pico-PSU power supply for the GIGABYTE J1900N-D3V and 6.3 Watt idle power on the GIGABYTE GA-J1800N-D2H which is the dual core edition without the 2nd GBit port, the Renesas USB 3 hub, serial ports etc.

    Top power consumption in mixed Prime95, Furmark loads including some USB peripherals was 28 Watts for the Quad and 22 Watts for the Dual.

    A Cruical C300 SSD was used in all cases, which doesn't yet support the nice power saving features of the newer Crucial SSDs.

    I've tried shutting down unused peripheral devices (e.g. serial ports, 2nd Gbit Ethernet) and limiting the PCIe speed to gen1 to see whether that had any measurable impact: It didn't for idle.

    I've been an AMD fan for decades, but I'm also trying to stay objective.

    And with regards to idle power and AMD:
    While I've measured surprisingly good idle power values for my first Trinity based APU (A10-5800K) as low as 18Watts with a high-end Asus motherboard, I'm shocked that my Kavery variant (A10-7850K) won't go below 30Watts all measured at behind the PSU.

    At the same time I've measured Gigabyte Brix using Intel A7-4500U CPUs (GIGABYTE BRIX GB-BXi7H-4500U) which achieved 7.5 Watts of idle power, but beat the A10-5800K on pretty much every benchmark, CPU, GPU or both while it didn't exceed 25 Watts of system consumption (vs. 100 Watts for the AMD APU).

    Again I'd love to be able to report otherwise, but compute power per Watt is AMD's high-end weakness and idle power the low-end weakness. Which one is more important depends on your use case but both are currently killer criteria.
  • abufrejoval - Tuesday, October 21, 2014 - link

    The coolest thing about the ASrock boards is that they support 16GB of DRAM!

    Officially BayTrail tops out at 8GB but this may turn out to be more of a typical Intel "product castration" feature than a hardware limit. I haven't actually tried this on my GIGABYTE J1900N-D3V and would be afraid, that the BIOS might still limit that board to 8GB, but I've seen reports of people using ASRock Q1900B-ITX or ASRock Q1900M (includes a physical PCIe x16 slot with x1 connectivity) with 16GB of DRAM.
  • mjnhstyle100x - Friday, October 17, 2014 - link

    The power consumption delta is something I do not like. I rather see the idle and load instead. The idle tells me how much my "nas/htpc" system will consume while doing nothing. the load tells me what is the absolute worse it will consume. this allows me to weigh the options better on power consumption basis, not the delta as that's not what is going to matter when the system is going to be idling for prolonged periods.
    The power consumption delta is something I do not like. I rather see the idle and load instead. The idle tells me how much my "nas/htpc" system will consume while doing nothing. the load tells me what is the absolute worse it will consume. this allows me to weigh the options better on power consumption basis, not the delta as that's not what is going to matter when the system is going to be idling for prolonged periods.
  • anactoraaron - Friday, October 17, 2014 - link

    I decided to flip back and forth to compare the 3770 and 3740 Bay Trail T to the Bay Trail D... It's surprising how well the lower powered T fares when compared to the D.
  • rootheday3 - Friday, October 17, 2014 - link

    Table on page 1 says Baytrail graphics has 6 EUs => not correct; Baytrail only has 4EUs.
  • duploxxx - Friday, October 17, 2014 - link

    poor poor Bay-trail GPU, only half the performance of the competing AMD part. No wonder Intel lost money in that segment. You would expect that in 2014 Intel would understand that graphical is actually what you see and use these days. Even CPU it is not faster. This is again a moment like the brazos part, this was also way better then the atom, yet the djingle and oem designs forced everybody to buy that peace of crap because there were only few brazos designs.

    pitty that we dont see amd mullin tablets for x86, no those OEM yet have to get money to be convinced from intel because they know they get poor cpu designs............... and then complain the market does not accept these tablets, i have a crapy atom tablet here which now is just a radio station, no added value at all for anything else

    consumers are losing as usual.
  • silverblue - Friday, October 17, 2014 - link

    Apparently, the A6-6310 has a 15W TDP and a much faster GPU, using just over half the power of the 5350. Its base clock is 250MHz lower at 1.8GHz, but has a 2.4GHz turbo. The A5 is also enabled this time around.

    I'd really like to see one of these go through some thorough tests on AT; could make for a very interesting little machine. It's just a shame that they have gone for faster RAM over a dual channel controller, but the controller itself uses less power than before which is helpful.
  • abufrejoval - Tuesday, October 21, 2014 - link

    Running PC games on the box isn't a lot of fun fore sure, but running Android x86 gave quite another picture: The GPU may not be able to hold water against PC GPUs but it's quite powerfull enough for any Android game and benchmark that I tried, at least at 1080p.

    Tons more CPU power than the Snapdragon 800 on my Galaxy Note 3 and GPU performance in the same region.

    Sure the Snapdragon would never dream of burning 10Watts of power for that performance, but the GIGABYTE GA-J1900N-D3V isn't meant to be carried in your pocket. As high-end HDMI stick alternative, it doesn't do too badly.

    Nor as a Windows or Linux desktop for office work.

    With Lollipop we might see these use cases merge and full desktop office suites like Softmaker's will do the transition.
  • Samus - Friday, October 17, 2014 - link

    I have the Foxconn board. It was the only board with a 16x slot (1x electrical) so I wouldn't have to cut the slot or card connector to make it fit a videocard. I run a GT430 in it.

    I actually tested the GT430 on the previous board (H61, 2nd gen i3-2100) using clear tape to "disconnect" 15 lanes of the PCI-E connector on the card and benchmark the difference between 16x and 1x. No measurable difference.

    The GT430 just doesn't have enough compute to saturate the bus even at 1x. Some people have said 3D compute performance takes a hit (something I didn't measure) but this is for an HTPC. I'm sticking with the GT430 because it's still the best low-power passive-cooled HTPC card available.

    I just didn't feel the onboard Intel HD video is compelling enough for HTPC use. The customization leaves a lot to be desired and it can't lock 23.976.

    Just thought I'd let everyone know this makes an excellent, low-watt HTPC platform as long as you stick with a PCIe videocard. The Asus board can do it (it has clearance behind the 1x PCIe slot for the remaining connector of the card) but you'd have to cut the board connector with an x-acto or dremel, voiding your warranty. Likewise, you can hack off most of the PCIe connector on a cheap video card, too.

    Something I want to point out. Power usage of Baytrail is about 5w lower when you don't use the iGPU. The iGPU is completely power-gated when its disabled. This allows the chip to boost more often as well.

    I wish this information were in the review, but now you have it.
  • Mvoigt - Sunday, October 19, 2014 - link

    http://www.zotac.com/products/graphics-cards/gefor... slap this in, no need to cut anything...
  • Samus - Monday, October 20, 2014 - link

    I thought about a 1x card, and the GT610 has all the bells and whistles of NVidia's drivers (specifically the HTPC customizations)

    However, the GT430 is the last entry-level passive-cooled card made with a 128-bit bus...although its mostly pointless for HTPC use I think it does make a difference in occasional Bluray accelerated 3D playback.

    But the real reason I wanted to stick with the GT430 is I already had one lying around. If I were going to build from scratch, I'd probably consider a 1x card if the price were right. Used Matrox 1x cards can be had on eBay dirt cheap and they are also very customizable in resolution\frequency.
  • Mvoigt - Tuesday, October 21, 2014 - link

    I see your point.... but the geforce GT730 comes in 1X format... and wastly more powerfull than the gt 430
  • Mvoigt - Tuesday, October 21, 2014 - link

    No critisismen, but let's hope never cards emerge with 128bit..... i feel what you'r saying.... but quad core low power platform with decent card's with make light gaming possible....
  • Mvoigt - Tuesday, October 21, 2014 - link

    They are fucking up the ram though..... 5 years ago i had GTX260 with 448bit ram interface......
  • Mvoigt - Tuesday, October 21, 2014 - link

    or 4 years ago, dont remember.....
  • DanNeely - Friday, October 17, 2014 - link

    Why do these boards even need a 4pin 12v power connector? Unlike LGA 1150 boards with an x16 PCIe slot, they don't need to worry about a high power CPU and a 75W PCIe card. Legacy PCI runs solely on 3.3v; and x1 cards are limited to 25W. Like p3 and earlier boards they're only drawing at most few amps of 12V; which the big ATX connector is more than capable of providing.
  • wetwareinterface - Sunday, October 19, 2014 - link

    the 4 pin is there because you can't rely on the atx connector to provide enough amperage on a small 150-175 watt low profile power supply to give you enough when running a card in the slot. also remember there are 2 pci-e connectors on the asus and a pci-e and pci connector running off a bridge on the gigabyte (effectively making it 2 pci-e slots as far as power is concerned)
  • Samus - Monday, October 20, 2014 - link

    I had a previous Atom board that ran without the 4-pin connector...UNTIL you plugged in a PCIe card, then it'd just beep and not post.
  • Antronman - Friday, October 17, 2014 - link

    I'd much rather be using a Kabini for some mainstream browsing and multimedia.
  • speculatrix - Friday, October 17, 2014 - link

    the first UEFI firmware on the Gigabyte motherboard was just awful, the followup F2 was slightly better, but to make it useable you need the F3 version. Updating can be a problem, I started a discussion about it here:
    http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums/viewtopic.php...

    there was a big discussion about baytrail motherboards on the silentpcreview forums, here:
    http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums/viewtopic.php...
  • rstuart - Saturday, October 18, 2014 - link

    "Load Delta Power Consumption" is just jargon - and you don't define it. Googling it return just one page of hits. If they are any indication, it total draw from the wall.

    But even that figure is meaningless unless you tell us what conditions the test was done under. Eg, was the test setup identical for all systems tested, not just the motherboards in question. What power supply was used? What does load was the system put under?

    Also, a comparison of the system at idle versus under load would be interesting. Most of the time my systems are idle.
  • Bonesdad - Saturday, October 18, 2014 - link

    White titled on a white background...
  • valkyrie743 - Sunday, October 19, 2014 - link

    the ASUS J1900I-C looks like nice for a simple XBMC box.
  • Mvoigt - Sunday, October 19, 2014 - link

    Just slap an Zotac geforce 610 PCI 1gb ddr3 in the pci slot and you got and decent machine for sligthly older games.... :) even never ones at low res....
  • evident - Sunday, October 19, 2014 - link

    I would have loved to see J2900 numbers in this article as well to represent the top end of these bay trails. I still don't care what anyone says, I still don't feel this is a viable platform for granny's daily web surfing and farmville activities, let alone a HTPC. you just cant justify miserable performance when you can step up to a sandy bridge celeron for way better performance.

    if you look at real world pricing for J1900 based machines, the only winners are the pc box manufacturers charging $200-300 for this garbage. you can easily pick up a haswell pentium or last generation ivy bridge pentium for that price if you wait for a clearance.
  • abufrejoval - Tuesday, October 21, 2014 - link

    I'd love to see those, too. Even more I'd like to be able to actually purchase J2900 hardware, but I have yet to see any.
  • dealcorn - Monday, October 20, 2014 - link

    Several posters have suggested that Kabini may be more attractive than Silvermont. In the real world where companies report revenues quarterly, Baytrail-D and Baytrail-M took significant market share from AMD during the second quarter of 2014. The trend accelerated as Atom claimed increased market share during the third quarter and I believe Dr. Su projects this share loss trend will continue in the fourth quarter. The reasons this occurred are not discussed in the Article but are sort of obvious if you look at real word pricing and real word consumer preferences.

    Today, Newegg will sell you a AMD’s Kabini 5350 for $65 and a BIOSTAR AM1MHP motherboard with Gb Ethernet for $32 making the 5350 a $97 platform. Alternately, you could buy a ASRock Q1900M with a single Gb Ethernet connection for $70. The real world 5350 platform costs $27 (38%) more. I would argue that ASRock is a preferred brand name over Biostar and perceived brand quality does matter at the low end. Obviously, the 5350 has better graphics for gaming but the J1900 supports 1080p video or better in all major codecs. Because the J1900 is significantly cheaper and has fully adequate graphics for everyone but gamers, sales of the 5350 are limited to cheap dedicated gamers and the 5350 dominates the cheap dedicated gamers segment. Problem is, gamers tend not to be that cheap. For a few dollars more than $97 you can step up to a super gimped Intel big core solution with discrete graphics card and far greater game potential than the 5350 solution. In the real world, it does not help to dominate a market niche with trivial sales volume and the quarterly earning releases of AMD and Intel powerfully make this point.

    As a side note, the J1900 motherboards tested in the Article feature dual NIC's and that is an expensive feature in this price class. By way of contrast, Newegg sells no AM1 motherboards with dual NIC's. Because J1900 is very efficient, some folks leave them powered on 24/7 so they can act as a passively cooled firewall/router download station. Finally, Intel does not use contra-revenue with either Baytrail-D or Baytrail-M, These are full margin products. Anyone who asserts otherwise just got hit kinda hard with the stupid stick.
  • silverblue - Monday, October 20, 2014 - link

    I can buy a 5350 for about £40 and a Biostar AM1ML board for £20. An MSI J1900I costs a little under £60, so you can get into both for about the same price. I suppose it depends on features in the end.

    As it is, AMD should cut at least £5 off the RRP.
  • KWIE - Monday, October 20, 2014 - link

    I actually love this little platform - I went for the ASRock Q1900-ITX as I needed four SATA headers to use it as the base for a FreeNAS box with Plex installed in a jail (FreeNAS booting from USB and 4-drive mirrored/striped with ZFS). It works absolutely wonderfully and the only thing I can hear is the drives. For around 200 euros I was able to buy this, BitFenix Prodigy case, 8GB RAM etc. etc. etc. and I was able to move the drives out of my main rig which now doesn't have to be on 24/7, saving more than the thing is worth a year in power (my main rig idles at around 100W - this idles at 14W. Going on a 24/7 calculation and with prices in Germany (25c per KWh) this means I'm saving around 184 a year). Can't complain in the slightest.
  • llisandro - Monday, October 20, 2014 - link

    Ian, I was really hoping to see Anandtech's usual "Decoding and Rendering Benchmarks" on these guys, bummer. I would assume people care more about HTPC-centric benchmarks than raw CPU power on these kinds of systems.
  • friikazoid - Monday, October 20, 2014 - link

    I have a question for those of you, who have experience building with these(/similar) boards.

    Would any of you be willing to post your complete builds with these? As in the case, memory, drives you chose? I've been building standard desktops for years, but would really like to try a small experiment with one of these. I'll be honest though, I don't have as much time on my hands now as I used to to do some research. So if anyone has suggestions on how to put a small cheap system together with these, I would appreciate it?

    For example, do you guys go for HTPC/mini-ITX type cases? Typical PSU or use extrenal brick? Any cases work better than others? Have any fun tricks with hardware, etc. to make things work?

    I was thinking something like this could be really fun with an immersion liquid cooled system. Not for performance obviously, just for the effect, haha.
  • abufrejoval - Tuesday, October 21, 2014 - link

    I used a M350 Universal Mini-ITX enclosure and an 80Watt Pico PSU, because that was the first one to include the required 12V connector. External brick is a 60Watt type. Both the Pico PSU and the brick are overspec'd but there is nothing lower available. For this board idle power is 10Watts the dual Core variant with a little less hardware did 6.3 Watts so the Pico PSU/Brick combination doesn't seem too bad. Certainly an onboard PSU with an 19V supply would be more elegant.
    I used 2 4GB Kingston Value RAM DIMMs, which need to be 1.35V low power.
    For storage I took an older C300 256GB from Crucial that was lying around, because the major aim was a silent desktop.

    The system is 100% silent and sufficiently fast enough for all desktop like activities. I've tried Windows 7 and 8, CentOS 6+7, Fedora 20 and Android x86 with good success and support.

    It's so uncomplicated and stable it's downright boring.
  • schizoide - Monday, October 20, 2014 - link

    Asus and HP Chromeboxes are regularly available for ~$135. They have Haswell celeron CPUs, which are much, much faster than these atoms. For that price you also get a case, 2GB RAM, a 16GB M2 SSD, and wifi. Oh, and it has a HDMI port. Out of the box they make amazing HTPCs-- install openELEC and you're good to go with XBMC or Plex.

    Everything is fully upgradable, if you want to replace the RAM and SSD you can do so. They work 100% fine in linux and can run windows too, although you do need USB audio for that as no drivers work. The chromeboxes aren't fanless, but they are very, very quiet.

    Given that the chromeboxes exist at that price point, I can't figure out what consumer need these atoms really fill.
  • Shiitaki - Monday, October 20, 2014 - link

    I happen to be using an quad core Atom for my HTPC, but only to get the Nvidia GPU that is part of the motherboard.

    In any other scenario it is better to buy the least expensive motherboard and desktop processor. For 20 or 30 bucks more you get far better performance, better connectivity, etc. The ITX is a great idea, but the premium on the parts, and practical considerations like connecting hard disks make it less useful than it would seem.

    If I am building a NAS, then I should use a motherboard with 6 SATA and a power supply with enough connectors. If I'm building a media center pc, software decode is still the best, most comapatible, and future proof. And that will take something better than an Atom.

    Between Intel holding the Atom back at the beginning, and the aggressive pricing of the core cpus, the Atom is hard to justify since the cost savings is so small when you consider the cost of the entire machine.
  • LoneWolf15 - Tuesday, October 21, 2014 - link

    Excellent article. This makes it clear that I wouldn't replace my Core i3-3225 in my home theater PC, but the Gigabyte board with its dual NICs would make an incredible platform for Sophos free home firewall appliance with UTM.

    http://www.sophos.com/en-us/products/free-tools/so...

    It's limited to fifty IPs (fine for home) but something like this gives you a big boy's toy for experimenting with LAN configurations, using your home as a lab.
  • abufrejoval - Tuesday, October 21, 2014 - link

    Some additional data you may find useful:

    The nominal clock rates seem to be for marketing purposes mostly and might have been hard limits in the previous generation (J1850 and J1750): I've never seen them in practice.

    The J1900 and J1800 parts are officially listed as 2.41 or 2.58 Turbo frequencies, but contrary to Haswell U-type CPUs they hit and sustain that speed constantly under load and they drop to 1.3GHz on idle.

    Same with the GPU speeds, which will sustain the maximum specified speeds as J1900/J1800 parts.

    I've run Prime95 for hours on the J1900 without it ever dropping below 2.41 GHz. When I add FurMark for the GPU, it will start lowering down, once it reaches the throttling temperature configured in the BIOS (or the internal hard limit). That combination reached 28 Watts behind the PSUs (Pico-ATX & external 12V brick), while idle for was around 10 Watts for the GA-J1900N-D3V and 6.3 Watts for a GA-J1800N-D2H (maximum power there was 22 Watts).

    The J1800 couldn't be pushed to throttle nor any higher than 60°C with any combination of Prime95 and Furmark nor wourld it ever use any frequency below the "Turbo" setting.

    The J1900 reached the 80°C throttle I had configured in the BIOS after hours of running Prime95 and Furmark in combination inside a M350 Universal Mini-ITX enclosure by Mini-Box Black.

    No CPU or Graphics benchmark alone will ever get there, you'd need both so I'm confident it never throttles during normal use. Using the exact same passive cooler on both devices may not be optimal, but the 10 Watt TDP figure on both J1900 and J1800 is simply misleading: The two devices never use the same power under load or idle.

    At 2.41 GHz the J1900 reached about 80% of the speed of a Core2 based QX9100 at 2.4 GHz using 18 Watts instead of 58 Watts on POVray and CineBench 15 CPU (no GPU) loads: The IPC is pretty impressive and these are full CPU cores, not hyperthreads or partial clusters sharing FPUs or decoders.

    The DVI connector carries full audio signals and with an DVI to HDMI dongle you have full HDMI functionality including HDCP. 1980x1200 resolution works with DVI and VGA, but might not with HDMI.

    I found it hard to gauge, where the almost 4 Watts of idle power difference between the two Gigabyte boards came from (10 vs. 6.3).

    CPU-Z always reported similar power figures for the quad J1900 and the dual J1800 under load and idle, while the power meter behind the PSU showed twice the increase when the quad CPU was loaded vs. the dual.

    It leads me to believe that CPU-Z measures power figures only on one of the two J1900 dual clusters: No idea wether this is a software bug or and LPC bug.

    Apart from dual vs. quad CPU the J1900 hold the Renesas USB hub chip and the extra Ethernet port. Deactivating the second Ethernet port (or in fact both) mode no difference whatsoever on idle power which leaves either the USB hub itself or simply signals that the 2nd CPU complex doesn't shut down completely, while the system is idle.

    This review could have provided a clue with some careful idle power comparison between these boards: An opportunity missed!

    If the extra CPU complex is the culprit (hard to imagine, actually) a J1800 might be the better choice for desktop work, where the two extra cores of a J1900 won't find anything useful to do.

    I can't see too many people using a J1900 doing Linux kernel compiles or even Android builds, but there the two extra cores might actually be useful.

    I wanted a completely silent system first of all and worried somewhat less about the last Watt of idle power consumption. One use case other than (or in addition to) silent desktop would be a firewall, home server and SIP telephony appliance and in that case the extra CPU cores allow for a little more headroom.

    As would an extra 8GB of DRAM, which is not supposed to work according to Intel, but simply does if you buy an ASRock branded J1900, which simply support 16GB!

    Most likely it's an Intel market segmentation limitation and not a technical obstacle, but your BIOS most likely needs to support it, too.
  • artk2219 - Friday, October 24, 2014 - link

    I just wanted to post this here. Dualcore sandy bridge cpu, m-itx, m-pcie, it can run a laptop display, msata, runs off a 19v powersupply from a dell or hp, and uses sodimms in case you have any laptop memory around. For 52 dollars.

    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
  • GlauberReis - Sunday, November 20, 2016 - link

    Does it j1900 it's good to development java, javascript, frameworks and database ?

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