Bay-trail motherboards

All about them.

Moderators: NeilBlanchard, Ralf Hutter, sthayashi, Lawrence Lee

Post Reply
speculatrix
Posts: 72
Joined: Fri Feb 14, 2014 10:03 am

Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by speculatrix » Fri Mar 28, 2014 5:00 am

FrankL wrote:I don't understand why these boards (except for the Supermicro ones) don't come with build-in DC-DC circuitry.
The ASRock IMB-151 has a DC in jack.

IME, admittedly long ago when I worked in embedded systems, the huge variety of local rules and regulations for power supplies, makes it much easier to stick with a standard and make the PSU someone else's problem. Throw in the requirements for intrinsically safe enviroments, or the extra EMC resistance and safety requirements for systems installed in hospitals etc, and it's no wonder this market develops slowly.

BORIStheBLADE
Posts: 7
Joined: Sat Mar 01, 2014 5:06 am
Location: Santa Clara, CA

Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by BORIStheBLADE » Fri Mar 28, 2014 5:30 am

HFat wrote:
BORIStheBLADE wrote:So with the setup I posted earlier and a Rosewill Capstone 450 watt I'm getting 15.5 -16 watts at idle with the Kill-a-Watt tester. PSU barely fits in this case..
I don't know how efficient your PSU is exactly but it ought not to be terrible and so your reading is unimpressive. I don't know if it's accurate but this is not encouraging. I'll miss Intel's boards.
Or maybe you had a power-hungry hard drive running? Or another peripheral which can explain the power consumption?
So far the only person I know running this MOBO has his down to 11.5 watts with a 60 watt PSU. I'm going to be adding 2 more 3 TB hard drives also. I bought this PSU for $40.00 and it comes with 6 SATA and its 80% so I don't consider 15-16 watt usage all that bad..

BORIStheBLADE
Posts: 7
Joined: Sat Mar 01, 2014 5:06 am
Location: Santa Clara, CA

Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by BORIStheBLADE » Fri Mar 28, 2014 5:35 am

speculatrix wrote:
HFat wrote:
BORIStheBLADE wrote:So with the setup I posted earlier and a Rosewill Capstone 450 watt I'm getting 15.5 -16 watts at idle with the Kill-a-Watt tester. PSU barely fits in this case..
I don't know how efficient your PSU is exactly but it ought not to be terrible and so your reading is unimpressive. I don't know if it's accurate but this is not encouraging. I'll miss Intel's boards.
Or maybe you had a power-hungry hard drive running? Or another peripheral which can explain the power consumption?
His 450W PSU might be 90% efficient at normal loads of 10 to 20% and up, but here it's operating at only 3% of fully rated load and so efficiency is likely to be poor maybe only 60 to 70%, so quite possibly with 15W idle draw, the PSU is wasting 5W.

One issue I've faced is to find a Gold+ efficiency PSUs with just 150W or output, so that they are operating in their high efficiency range. You'll need to talk to a more specialist retailer like LinITX for these sort of parts:
http://linitx.com/category/1u-power-supplies/150
Another guy running this Mobo with a 60 watt PSU is getting 11.5 watt usage. This is going to be for a server so I wanted more SATA from the PSU. This comes with 6 and I really don't see a difference of 4 watts compared to a 60 watt PSU breaking the bank here.

BORIStheBLADE
Posts: 7
Joined: Sat Mar 01, 2014 5:06 am
Location: Santa Clara, CA

Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by BORIStheBLADE » Fri Mar 28, 2014 5:40 am

HFat wrote:Going by johnnyguru's review, the efficiency ought to be a bit higher. Even if it burned 5W, what business does this board have to consume 10.5-11W DC anyway?
There are efficient (and quiet/silent!) PSUs in regular retail channels by the way.
So how low did Johnnyguru say he got this boards power draw to? So far the only other review of this board I've seen was with different SSD and RAM with a 60 watt PSU drawing 11.5.

MikeC
Site Admin
Posts: 12285
Joined: Sun Aug 11, 2002 3:26 pm
Location: Vancouver, BC, Canada
Contact:

Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by MikeC » Fri Mar 28, 2014 5:45 am

FrankL wrote:I don't understand why these boards (except for the Supermicro ones) don't come with build-in DC-DC circuitry......
These bay trail solutions are very interesting, but all the extra costs easily add up to having a 200-240 euro solution when compared to a 80 euro Raspberry Pi, or up to around 150 euro for a more powerful quad core ARMv7 solution with 2GB RAM. I wish the price difference would be smaller....
I agree that a built-in DC power supply like those on the thin mitx board would be nice, but I think these new Atoms are way beyond the performance of the Raspberry Pi or ARMv7. No comparison, really.

FrankL
Posts: 72
Joined: Sun Sep 28, 2003 10:28 am

Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by FrankL » Fri Mar 28, 2014 7:26 am

MikeC wrote:
FrankL wrote:I don't understand why these boards (except for the Supermicro ones) don't come with build-in DC-DC circuitry......
These bay trail solutions are very interesting, but all the extra costs easily add up to having a 200-240 euro solution when compared to a 80 euro Raspberry Pi, or up to around 150 euro for a more powerful quad core ARMv7 solution with 2GB RAM. I wish the price difference would be smaller....
I agree that a built-in DC power supply like those on the thin mitx board would be nice, but I think these new Atoms are way beyond the performance of the Raspberry Pi or ARMv7. No comparison, really.
You are likely right in terms of performance (although I anticipate that a quad core A15 will perform not too bad in comparison with a dual core Bay Trail of equal wattage).

However, in terms of price the bay trail solutions just aren't that cheap considering all the required extras (case, psu/dc-dc). The total price is very close to a core-series Celeron solution.

Integrated DC-DC would push the total price a bit further down, as would providing board with 2GB or 4GB RAM soldered-on + 1 SO-DIMM.

HFat
Posts: 1753
Joined: Thu Jul 03, 2008 4:27 am
Location: Switzerland

Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by HFat » Fri Mar 28, 2014 9:11 am

Yes, the price is basically the same as the 847 Celeron boards, which are dated and slow.
Most faster Celeron solutions are significantly more expensive unless of course you avert your eyes from the cheaper case/PSU combos, insist on using expensive drives and so forth. And of course they use a fan!
The less said about AMDs "of equal wattage" (hah!), the better.
No, there is currently one board which competes with Bay Trail: the GA-C1037UN-EU. And it is indeed a worthy competitor... if you're planning on using a suitable case. I suspect that most Bay Trail boards will accomodate a wider variety of cases without overheating but we'll just have to wait for someone to provide us test results. I will in time post results for a board or two but I'm not going to buy many different models.

It has generally been cheaper not to use a board which takes DC due to their cost, especially if you're going to need to buy a brick. I like the efficiency of the Intel boards which take DC however.
BORIStheBLADE wrote:So how low did Johnnyguru say he got this boards power draw to?
You'll find efficiency numbers for a PSU of the same series as yours at johnnyguru, is all.

speculatrix
Posts: 72
Joined: Fri Feb 14, 2014 10:03 am

Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by speculatrix » Fri Mar 28, 2014 9:53 am

HFat wrote:there is currently one board which competes with Bay Trail: the GA-C1037UN-EU
What's the relative performance of the baytrail-D vs that Ivy Bridge Celeron?
http://ark.intel.com/compare/79052,76529,78867,71995
is it worth the extra 7W power usage I wonder?


found some benchmarks which look somewhat useful:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/bay ... 614-4.html

so using ark.intel.com to work out the relative specifications, I would guess the J1900 is very roughly on a par with the 1037 for performance, and the answer is no, a 70% increase in power has no real benefit.

HFat
Posts: 1753
Joined: Thu Jul 03, 2008 4:27 am
Location: Switzerland

Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by HFat » Fri Mar 28, 2014 10:17 am

speculatrix wrote:What's the relative performance of the baytrail-D vs that Ivy Bridge Celeron?
http://ark.intel.com/compare/79052,76529,78867,71995
is it worth the extra 7W power usage I wonder?
If you're comparing to quads which are currently more expensive (n=1), then it's mostly going to depend on whether your load is multi-threaded or not. Your guess isn't even wrong because if it's not, the 1037U could potentially be more than twice as fast as the J1900 depending on the specifics of your load (more likely the difference would be smaller). But in that case, you'd better off using the J1800 anyway.
CPU performance can't be reduced to a single number! Then there are features. And the GPUs are different too.

The 7W number is useless because Intel typically overstates power consumption in a non-predictable way. For one thing, it's obvious the J1800 consumes significantly less power than it's rating. Finding out what the actual difference is woudn't be trivial but who cares anyway? What matters is the power consumption of the whole board and how well the CPU heatsink works in practice.

speculatrix
Posts: 72
Joined: Fri Feb 14, 2014 10:03 am

Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by speculatrix » Fri Mar 28, 2014 11:43 am

Yeah, CPU performance benchmarks are a pretty slippery set of statistics.

FrankL
Posts: 72
Joined: Sun Sep 28, 2003 10:28 am

Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by FrankL » Sat Mar 29, 2014 12:01 am

FrankL wrote:I don't understand why these boards (except for the Supermicro ones) don't come with build-in DC-DC circuitry.

The target market for me appears to be the low-cost/low-performance market (between the Core-arch Celerons and boards powered by an ARM SoC). Having to add a mini ITX case with PSU or external brick + picoPSU is going to add quite a bit of costs.

A build-in DC-DC circuitry would save money and effort compared to having to buy a picoPSU (and accommodating it into the case including routing the external brick hookup).

These bay trail solutions are very interesting, but all the extra costs easily add up to having a 200-240 euro solution when compared to a 80 euro Raspberry Pi, or up to around 150 euro for a more powerful quad core ARMv7 solution with 2GB RAM. I wish the price difference would be smaller....
To answer my own post, Asrock has an upcoming mini ITX board with DC-DC, the Asrock Q1900DC-ITX.

I'd be nice to have a comprehensive set of benchmarks of dual core Baytrail, quad core Baytrail, Celeron 847, 1027U and G1820 compared, including video decoding capabilities (built-in AVC decoder, flash decode performance, etc.)

speculatrix
Posts: 72
Joined: Fri Feb 14, 2014 10:03 am

Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by speculatrix » Tue Apr 01, 2014 2:33 am

Since I wanted to use these boards for a firewall/router, I wanted more than two NICs and discovered that Startech make a miniPCIe card giving a single gigabit port, it's the StarTech ST1000SMPEX
http://sgcdn.startech.com/005329/media/ ... 0SMPEX.pdf
price is £30 upwards available on Amazon and other sites.

FrankL
Posts: 72
Joined: Sun Sep 28, 2003 10:28 am

Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by FrankL » Tue Apr 01, 2014 10:12 am

FrankL wrote:I don't understand why these boards (except for the Supermicro ones) don't come with build-in DC-DC circuitry.

The target market for me appears to be the low-cost/low-performance market (between the Core-arch Celerons and boards powered by an ARM SoC). Having to add a mini ITX case with PSU or external brick + picoPSU is going to add quite a bit of costs.

A build-in DC-DC circuitry would save money and effort compared to having to buy a picoPSU (and accommodating it into the case including routing the external brick hookup).

These bay trail solutions are very interesting, but all the extra costs easily add up to having a 200-240 euro solution when compared to a 80 euro Raspberry Pi, or up to around 150 euro for a more powerful quad core ARMv7 solution with 2GB RAM. I wish the price difference would be smaller....
Today Intel announced a Baytrail solution that aim to close the gap between ARM SBC (single board computers) and Intel solutions: Minnowboard MAX.
It'll come in various versions (single/dual/quad core with 1/2/4 GB of RAM and 5/7/10 Watt TDP respectively).

marmar
Posts: 8
Joined: Wed Jan 16, 2013 9:06 am

Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by marmar » Thu Apr 03, 2014 9:14 am

Hey guys,

I'll share with you some details about my struggle with the Gigabyte J1900 board GA-J1900N-D3V I bought couple of days ago.

1. I managed to start it after trying the third ram stick that finally worked. Apparently 1.5V ddr3 is not the way to go. With bad RAM the machine just keeps restarting after 15 seconds or so, you hear just the clicks when it starts.

2. I was not able to upgrade bios because after installing Windows 8.1, Gigabyte App center utility required for BIOS updating utility gave me the following error when trying to install:
Error Number: 0x80040707
Description DLL function call crashed: CheckFK.Search.BIOSStr
I was not able to resolve it. It might have something to do with the dot net framework. The App center required dot net which was for download on gigabyte website but because Win8.1 was already with .NET, it didn't help. Also a .NET removal tool won't work as I have tried - with win8.1 its just build in.
The board has no QFlash and booting DOS with UEFI is not possible (I guess).
Any advice on how to update BIOS is welcomed!!! (like a confirmed win8.1 torrent that works with gigabyte crappy software)

3. I managed to boot Debian AMD64 CD with external USB DVD drive and installed in UEFI mode. I felt very lucky :)

4. after second restart the BIOS got damaged and everything was restored to the previous settings (dual BIOS is perhaps not a feature but a bug - an unstable bios but you get two so you can restore from the other one :)) and I couldn't boot debian linux again. Thank god for the debian rescue mode - enter shell on /dev/sda2, mounted /dev/sda1 on /boot/EFI and used efibootmgr, grub --install, or something like that to make it work.

5. now I am stuck with No screens found, No devices detected when starting X server - after adding intel as a Driver to xorg.conf.
Any help would be appreciated :) I guess it must be the same graphics as with J1800 boards but I was not able to find any solution on the web. 4 hours wasted with this is not enough :D haha

This board has cost me a lot of time already and is the worst to work with and I had plenty of gigabytes before. I will drink a bottle of good old red wine when I see flawless 1080p playback in XBMC.

speculatrix
Posts: 72
Joined: Fri Feb 14, 2014 10:03 am

Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by speculatrix » Thu Apr 03, 2014 9:23 am

I heard from Gigabyte that they've only had tens of these J1900 boards on sale in Europe and they don't know when more are coming. Perhaps they have realised there's a bug in the board (the J1800 board is now on v1.1).

Anyway, have you tried building and installing a fresh set of Intel HD drivers?
https://01.org/linuxgraphics/

marmar
Posts: 8
Joined: Wed Jan 16, 2013 9:06 am

Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by marmar » Thu Apr 03, 2014 12:40 pm

thanks for the link, haven't tried that but it looks like those new versions could make it work.
i might upgrade to debian jessie first - a testing release and see if it is has new enough packages.

speculatrix
Posts: 72
Joined: Fri Feb 14, 2014 10:03 am

Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by speculatrix » Thu Apr 03, 2014 2:38 pm

oh no, we haven't even got our Baytrail-based motherboards and there's already a successor, Braswell:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=n ... px=MTY1Mzc

I'm not sure if this is Bra-swell or Bras-well.

gorkypl
Posts: 19
Joined: Mon Jul 04, 2011 4:53 am

Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by gorkypl » Thu Apr 03, 2014 11:47 pm

marmar wrote: Any advice on how to update BIOS is welcomed!!!
What about a 'traditional' way? Like booting from pendrive with .bin file or using the UEFI builtin upgrade (I guess there should be some)?
5. now I am stuck with No screens found, No devices detected when starting X server - after adding intel as a Driver to xorg.conf.
I guess that going with Debian stable while dealing with bleeding-edge hardware must give such results ;) You need the newest (beta, testing or however they are called) drivers.

speculatrix
Posts: 72
Joined: Fri Feb 14, 2014 10:03 am

Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by speculatrix » Thu Apr 03, 2014 11:51 pm

I think we're diverging of the subject, but you can pxe boot msdos and freedos images using the memdisk loader.

Code: Select all

LABEL	MSDOS_MEMDISK
	MENU LABEL 	MSDOS
	kernel		pxelinux.cfg/memdisk
	append		initrd=dos/msdos71.img


--edit-- fixed the swypo.

HFat
Posts: 1753
Joined: Thu Jul 03, 2008 4:27 am
Location: Switzerland

Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by HFat » Fri Apr 04, 2014 8:57 am

Thanks for your report, mamra. Good luck!

No Win7 32-bit drivers on the vendor's website did not fill me with confidence to begin with. Does anyone know the reason for that by the way? Is that also because of a compatibility issue with the BIOS or are there really no drivers?
speculatrix wrote:I heard from Gigabyte that they've only had tens of these J1900 boards on sale in Europe and they don't know when more are coming.
I have also seen their J1900 board out of stock everywhere.
edit: silly mistake... not out of stock! Only a less favorable stock status coupled with significant price increases.

marmar
Posts: 8
Joined: Wed Jan 16, 2013 9:06 am

Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by marmar » Sun Apr 06, 2014 11:24 am

speculatrix wrote:I think we're diverging of the subject, but you can pxe boot msdos and freedos images using the memdisk loader.

Code: Select all

LABEL	MSDOS_MEMDISK
	MENU LABEL 	MSDOS
	kernel		pxelinux.cfg/memdisk
	append		initrd=dos/msdos71.img


--edit-- fixed the swypo.
hmm, PXE boot? this never occurred to me as i have never booted this way but maybe it can be an alternative way to boot DOS and flash BIOS. although pretty complicated one :)
i don't think directly booting dos from a usb drive is possible - can dos be boot with uefi rom USB? how? i am not not very knowledgable in this regard.

i have good news though - upgraded to debian testing and i could boot to X instantly!
playing 1080p 11GB MKV now almost alright - there is some tear or something - i haven't had time to fix this although i am not sure even how, will have to play with settings a bit.

To my surprise the audio works through a DVI->HDMI adapter on my TV. This might be useful for some people, I always though DVI can't output audio but it apparently can.

mczak
Posts: 147
Joined: Wed Jul 21, 2004 6:13 pm

Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by mczak » Sun Apr 06, 2014 8:11 pm

Surely this uefi implementation has a CSM like every other board out there which allows you to boot old stuff?

nan0dog
Posts: 13
Joined: Sat May 17, 2003 5:39 pm

Couple of New j1900 with PCIE

Post by nan0dog » Tue Apr 08, 2014 2:55 pm

Thanks to Jakoob for his updating this thread. Looks like a few cheaper alternatives to the Gigabyte GA-J1900N-D3V and Supermivro X10SBA j1900 mini-itx boards are starting to come online in retail. The MSI MSI J1900I ( http://www.msi.com/product/mb/J1900I.html )for around €70 and the Asrock Q1900B ( http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/Q1900B-ITX/index.asp ) for around €60. They both have PCIE v2.0 x1 which is a lot more useful than the Gigabyte PCI expansion slot.
Asrock are unique in having official Windows 7 support listed.

speculatrix
Posts: 72
Joined: Fri Feb 14, 2014 10:03 am

Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by speculatrix » Tue Apr 08, 2014 11:34 pm

I find it interesting that many of these boards quote very high grade components, even mil spec, and have legacy connectors like serial and parallel, which indicates they are expected to be designed into very long-life products.

gietrzy
Posts: 8
Joined: Wed Apr 09, 2014 2:09 am

Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by gietrzy » Wed Apr 09, 2014 2:38 am

marmar wrote:about my struggle with the Gigabyte J1900 board GA-J1900N-D3V I bought
Hi everyone!

I got D3V 2 weeks ago too.

OK, to update bios to F2 version which support Win7/64!

you need to:

1. install Win8 enter trial
2. install that Gigabyte utility
3. download bios F2 from Gigabyte www manually; not from utility itself.
4. unzip file
5. PUT THE BIOS FILE in main folder of Gigabyte utility; C:\Program Files\Gigabyte\...
6. start Gigabyte utility, browse to that folder and now the bios file is seen by that s$%ty application
7. click update

8. install Windows 7/64

Facts:
- it runs youtube/vimeo 1080p very smoothly
- it runs youtube/vimeo 4K very smmothly; Panasonic GH4 sample movies.
- Skype runs smoothly with Logitech 930e; person in USA says he gets extremely good picture/sound of me (VFios, wi-fi router, Asus EM35 Deluxe, Win7/64HP, 2x4GB, Crucial M4/60GB).
- did not find any OC option in bios, not that I need/use it
- did not find option to flash bios from pendrive in bios - wtf!

I have 2x4GB Rip something memory 1600L, Crucial M4/60GB (I just bought M550/256GB), PicoPSU 80W + 12V/2A outside. Installed are Outpost Firewall Pro, Malwarebytes AM, full Windows Update, latest Intel Graphics.

Hope that helps, thank you.

Have a question: what is CPU C state? Which one to choose in bios?

washu
Posts: 571
Joined: Thu Nov 19, 2009 10:20 am
Location: Ottawa

Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by washu » Thu Apr 10, 2014 5:22 am

gietrzy wrote: Have a question: what is CPU C state? Which one to choose in bios?
C-States are power saving modes that your CPU can go into when it is idle. Unless they cause problems you should have them all turned on.

Jakoob
Posts: 59
Joined: Tue Jul 30, 2013 3:14 pm

Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by Jakoob » Thu Apr 10, 2014 6:14 am

Hi guys,
Some ASRock and MSI boards added... however I still feel there isn't too many interesting boards to buy. Most of them are limited to 2x SATA and absence of DC-in is another weak spot. Seems to me, that designers of those boards aren't using them :?

clarry
Posts: 7
Joined: Sun Dec 01, 2013 1:39 am

Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by clarry » Sun Apr 13, 2014 1:54 am

Can anyone confirm the DVI output on GA-J1900N-D3V is limited to 1920x1080?

It sounds ridiculous to me.

piglover
Posts: 134
Joined: Mon Jun 08, 2009 9:32 am
Location: California

Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by piglover » Sun Apr 13, 2014 11:45 am

clarry wrote:Can anyone confirm the DVI output on GA-J1900N-D3V is limited to 1920x1080?

It sounds ridiculous to me.
Normal DVI (DVI-I or DVI-D) is always limited to 1080p output. To exceed 1080p the interface must be Dual-Link DVI (DVI-DL).

The GA-J1900N-D3V is DVI-D (not Dual Link or DL) and is therefore limited to supporting 1080p.

Gigabyte does support higher resolution via RGB D-Sub connector, but it is analog and potentially subject to some visual degradation at high resolutions.

Vicotnik
*Lifetime Patron*
Posts: 1831
Joined: Thu Feb 13, 2003 6:53 am
Location: Sweden

Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by Vicotnik » Sun Apr 13, 2014 12:58 pm

I think 1920x1200 also works on single link DVI.

Post Reply