SPCR

I have the IMB151, been running it for a month or so now with TBS6981

Only supports Win8, BIOS doesn't seem to like booting reliably with Win7
Limited drivers around and no new BIOS as yet

Seems pretty stable

Idles at around 7-8w without Sat Card, 1 SODIM and a mSATA card. No KB, Mouse or HDMI connected just Ethernet

I contacted Gigabyte UK and asked when the GA-J1900 board would be on sale and they said towards the end of March. I hinted at whether there would be a J2900 or N28xx or N29xx variant and they didn't comment. Since I will be using the board as a linux file server, media streamer (icecast, DLNA (twonky & ps3 media server), and get-iplayer services, then the graphics performance doesn't matter to me, only fair CPU performance and good idle power.

A couple questions for you guys.

I was looking for a small mobo/cpu combo like this for a new server and need more SATA ports. If I were to use a PCI to SATA card will these PCI on most these boards be sufficient with at least two hard drives on them? Curious if it will slow down transfer speeds.

I have also been keeping an eye on the Intel Celeron 1037 mobo/cpu combos and how do these compare?

Thanks

BORIStheBLADE wrote:I was looking for a small mobo/cpu combo like this for a new server and need more SATA ports. If I were to use a PCI to SATA card will these PCI on most these boards be sufficient with at least two hard drives on them? Curious if it will slow down transfer speeds.

A miniPCIe x1 slot will carry 250MB/s, so fairly close to a 3Gb/s SATA link. A PCI slot can manage 133MB/s, so roughly half. It'd be fine for a basic media server where very high sustained transfer rates aren't too important.

I have also been keeping an eye on the Intel Celeron 1037 mobo/cpu combos and how do these compare?

the 1037 is Ivy Bridge, so is an older generation and more power hungry. Compare a Haswell Celeron, the IvyBridge Celeron, and the best Silvermont/Bay-Trail Atom:
http://ark.intel.com/compare/77774,78867,71995

Would it be possible for anybody who owns Bay Trail-D motherboard with CPU to attach CPU-Z screenshot?
I am curious if these products support AES-NI instruction set. Would be even better to see TrueCrypt benchmark results ;)
Fanless, energy efficient & encrypted ITX box is something many people are waiting for.

qazekNB wrote:anybody who owns Bay Trail-D motherboard with CPU to attach CPU-Z screenshot? curious if support AES-NI instruction set.

I am fairly sure they won't

http://ark.intel.com/compare/77774,78867,71995


edit - the link just to the J1900 didn't show AES-NI; so I put back the link to comparative CPUs

Let's hope you're wrong
I have "ASUS Transformer Book T100" which has CPU Bay Trail Z3740 and it does support AES-NI.

qazekNB wrote:Let's hope you're wrong
I have "ASUS Transformer Book T100" which has CPU Bay Trail Z3740 and it does support AES-NI.

The Z atoms support everything (also quicksync etc.).
I couldn't find a cpuinfo result for pentium n, but celeron n definitely does not seem to support it (/proc/cpuinfo output at the bottom): http://openbenchmarking.org/s/Intel%20Celeron%20N2820
And usually feature support is identical for celeron/pentiums made of the "same" cpu.

mczak wrote:

qazekNB wrote:Let's hope you're wrong
I have "ASUS Transformer Book T100" which has CPU Bay Trail Z3740 and it does support AES-NI.

The Z atoms support everything (also quicksync etc.).
I couldn't find a cpuinfo result for pentium n, but celeron n definitely does not seem to support it (/proc/cpuinfo output at the bottom): http://openbenchmarking.org/s/Intel%20Celeron%20N2820
And usually feature support is identical for celeron/pentiums made of the "same" cpu.

While AES-NI might be supported on the Z atoms, how does its implementation compare to a software-only algorithm? I doubt that the AES-NI on Atom performs the same as on Core cpus.

I'm sad to say, as I really do want AES-NI in my CPUs (because I back up my home linux fileserver to a USB drive whose file system is encrypted using LUKS), but ark.intel says the Z3740 (D and non-D) have it but not the J1900 or N2820:
http://ark.intel.com/compare/78867,79052,76759,78416


ark.intel.com seems to be unreliable at the moment, quite a few 500 server errors, so if that link breaks, reload until it works.

FrankL wrote:

mczak wrote:

qazekNB wrote:Let's hope you're wrong
I have "ASUS Transformer Book T100" which has CPU Bay Trail Z3740 and it does support AES-NI.

The Z atoms support everything (also quicksync etc.).
I couldn't find a cpuinfo result for pentium n, but celeron n definitely does not seem to support it (/proc/cpuinfo output at the bottom): http://openbenchmarking.org/s/Intel%20Celeron%20N2820
And usually feature support is identical for celeron/pentiums made of the "same" cpu.

While AES-NI might be supported on the Z atoms, how does its implementation compare to a software-only algorithm? I doubt that the AES-NI on Atom performs the same as on Core cpus.

These instructions are reasonably fast on Silvermont. The Z3770 manages 0.9GB/s in Truecrypt AES benchmark. This number compares quite well to 15W core i chips (obviously, the quad cores with way more TDP are going to be much faster), and it's roughly as fast as the Kabini A4-5000 (which also supports AES-NI): http://www.notebookcheck.com/Intel-Atom ... 847.0.html
The Pentium N3520 though "only" does around 0.26GB/s - that number actually still compares well to core i3-3xxx chips (which did not features AES-NI neither, only current gen i3 (4xxx) do). And for that benchmark, now even dual-core 1Ghz Kabini/Temash is faster.
http://www.notebookcheck.com/Intel-Pent ... 626.0.html

Asus J1800I-C added to the first post. again only 2x SATA

Jakoob wrote:Asus J1800I-C added to the first post. again only 2x SATA

thanks for doing this, Jakoob, it's very useful and much appreciated.

--edit-- when I searched Asus' website for J1900 it turned up these:
https://www.asus.com/EeeBox_PCs/EB1037/
https://www.asus.com/EeeBox_PCs/EB1036/

so I wouldn't be surprised if Asus produce a J1900IC board sometime soon.

Acer must have a J1900 motherboard because they have this:
http://www.acer.co.uk/ac/en/GB/content/ ... .SULEK.004
that might be a useful packaged product for someone?

the Gigabyte GA-J1900N-D3V is now in the online catalogue of scan.co.uk on pre-order, and alternate.co.uk says "soon available".

speculatrix wrote:the Gigabyte GA-J1900N-D3V is now in the online catalogue of scan.co.uk on pre-order, and alternate.co.uk says "soon available".

Alternate's website says the product is now in stock for delivery, so I guess Scan should be next. Unfortunately the Seasonic 360W 80+Gold PSU that I wanted to pair it with is also not in stock with Scan

Retailers claim it's in stock here. It's kind of expensive but it's one of those rare boards with 2xRS232, 2xRJ45 and VGA (user clarry said they needed that earlier).
Other boards do not seem to be in stock yet (though the MSI J1800 has been listed for ages).

What's the driver situation now? Anyone looked into that recently?

Biostar Intel Celeron J1800 is available now. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813138403

OK, finally found one of these locally. Got the Gigabyte one and some other goodies for my server build. I have a PSU and a PCIe to SATA card in the mail. they should be here in 4-7 days.

PC case - Lian Li pc-q25 mini Q
Mobo - GA-J1800N-D2H REV1.0
OS - Windows 8.1 64bit
SSD - Kingston Digital 120GB SSDNow V300
RAM - Patriot PSD34G13381S (2- 4GB 1333MHz SoDIMM)

there's now a v1.1 version of the ECS BAT-I
http://www.ecs.com.tw/ECSWebSite/Produc ... 17&LanID=0
there's no mention of specific CPUs

and the link to the v1.0 didn't work for me, a search on their main page gave me this:
http://www.ecs.com.tw/ECSWebSite/Produc ... 17&LanID=0
the v1.0 offers
Intel ® Bay Trail J1800 processor.
Intel ® Bay Trail J1900 processor.
Intel ® Bay Trail J2900 processor.

still on the subject of the GA-J1900N-D3V... no sign of anyone having stock in England; google shopping has occasionally popped up results for various suppliers, but then they disappear. Scan and Lambdatek have never shown stock. I saw what looked like a good price from Germany from Future-X, €92.39 with shipping, which is quite a decent price.
http://www.future-x.at/gigabyte-giby-ga ... 3529/?pv=2
I would have to check whether Gigabyte's warranty is pan-European though.

GA-J1800N-D2H is now reported to be in stock here, and is listed an attractive price (in line with the 847 boards). Finally.

Seen any reviews with information about how these Gigabyte boards fare in different cases?
And what about the drivers?

HFat wrote:GA-J1800N-D2H is now reported to be in stock here, and is listed an attractive price (in line with the 847 boards). Finally.

Seen any reviews with information about how these Gigabyte boards fare in different cases?
And what about the drivers?

Bios was a pain in the ass to update and drivers were ok. I have one last driver to update but don't know how to do it. The SATA RAID/AHCI driver on Gigabytes site it says, Note: Windows setup to read from USB thumb drive. I'm a bit confused. This is whats in the folder.



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..

Just set the BIOS to AHCI and leave the Microsoft AHCI driver alone. It works fine, no need to mess with it.

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?

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

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.

speculatrix wrote:I would have to check whether Gigabyte's warranty is pan-European though.

I asked them... Gigabyte UK responded to me:

UK RMA Team [email protected] wrote: Sorry warranty is non international, if you live in the UK and buy from another country, if the item requires warranty repair it will need to go back to that country for RMA service from the dealer you buy from. It is recommended only to buy from our UK distributors/sellers only if you live in the UK, a list of which is available on our website.

Overclockers UK have the Gigabyte J1800 board in stock for £50 inc vat - clickable link

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....