Nice review. I've been eagerly awaiting a Cedar Trail review that extensively tested power consumption. I am surprised it's idle power consumption has not improved much of past generations of Atoms. I was expecting the idle power consumption to be closer to Nettops with the addition of Speedstep but it doesn't look like this is the case, at least not with this Motherboard and ac adapter.

Unsurprisingly for a Jetway board, the power consumption is disappointing for what it is.

I am shocked too... from a cpu that draws 5W at full load how can you get 17w idle?

I have the Intel equivalent DN2800MT board which has a slightly faster CPU @ 1.86GHz but is still passive.
Running Windows 7 x86 using a very generic 120w 12v brick I see idle draw via a kill-a-watt-clone @ ~240V AC of 10-11w. Full load draw is around 16-17w so quite a bit lower than the Jetway.
Also, the latest (29 Feb 2012) Intel VGA driver fixes the terrible screen glitching; aero is unacceptably slow but in basic mode Win7 is fine.
I'll provide more details of my setup if anyone' is interested.

We need more info on driver issues. That would be welcome.
I suppose you're running 32 bits Win7.
How does the 64 bits work? How's the power consumption without the 32 bits driver?
Can you try a generic Linux liveCD? I have more questions if you're willing...

From the latest drivers from Intel I have seen no issues (not that were any other than with VGA).

And, yes, Win7 32bit. From other stuff I've read online (can't remember the link) all Cedar Trail are strictly 32bit. I guess this is because the onboard GPU is broken somehow in 64bit, but I have no personal evidence to support this. Anyway, I've not tried any 64bit OSes.

Power consumption appears to be identical with and without the Intel driver installed under Win7.

I've not tried a Linux LiveCD but have seen online (mini-itx.com I think) that others have run and installed linux successfully. I'll try a LiveCD at the weekend and feedback.

Sure but what I'd like is power consumption data (in text mode especially). My concern is that the GPU will waste power without a decent driver (or some way to disable the GPU). That's been a problem with other GPUs in the past. But maybe not with this one.

I'm also interested in this.

I mean, on-die decent hardware acceleration for videos is nice ('bout time, intel),

but what I feel more interested in is very low power consumption with average or near-idle load, with a fairly standard linux distribution without a gui.

silence and low power go very well with a home server, and since it will be a long time since Arm servers will finally hit the market, and not every software will be available immediately, and the raspberry pi still is not here, we need a real world low power intel solution, while we wait.

I wonder if the new atoms could be further downclocked/downvolted (especially under linux) to near-arm-based-nas levels, even at the price of going under 500Mhz...


to contrast, a complete Amd Neo-based proliant microserver (well, it's quite noisy, I'm told) ranges from 22W to around 60W with full load, and all the 3.5 drives spinning. A better solution is desirable, possibly something that (for example) using an SD as a drive and some lightweight software could run around 10 watts....

There have been Atoms which consume less than 10W for several years. The trouble is that they were never used in a retail board. At the retail level, you found them in complete devices (mostly small laptops). Boards are available from certain suppliers of course. But you didn't find them them in regular channels until very recently with the release of the DN2800MT (see the other thread for power consumption reports).

HFat, you mean this thread?

Be very interested to see comparison with some of the other Thin Mini-ITX boards, quite a few of them now, listed in this thread.

Shame about no XP support

As promised I tried a 11.04 x86 Ubuntu LiveCD. The power draw in idle (once the CD had stopped spinning and in normal desktop mode with a blank FireFox window open) was 12 watts; so this is 1-1.5 watt 'penalty' on Win7 x86. I didn't try any form of text mode but cannot imagine Linux's default lack-of-VGA-drivers-text-mode would be any worse than Ubuntu's default desktop mode.

Also, I rechecked my Win7 x86 power draw figures; idle at desktop is 10-11 watt; Prime95 is 14 watt and the highest figure I saw was with Prime 95 and spinning a DVD (at full speed) which hit 20 watt.

Hi Lawrence

May I know the PSUs that you're using in the review across the board?
The efficiency loss would play a huge role in power consumption over here. Thanks.

in the meantime, while we investigate the intel new lines, the eb 1020 keeps staring at me from web shops,
with its quite affordable package and official "Power Consumption Idle:9.396W Running:13.144W~18.77W"

this thing has less memory, but doesn't have an ssd but a regular hard drive, I'd be curious to know how it performs under linux, with some tuning and with a cheap sd card....

I'm starting to think that Intel might have better performance per watt, but not a clear winner in terms of power savings....

I'd be interested in particular in average-to-low load power consumption, idle shouldn't be that relevant for a 24x7 that's been turned on... well, for a reason.

FYI...

An Intel DN2800MT mini-ITX board based on the same chipset/Atom as the Jetway came into our possession today. With the pre-loaded drivers (and after all the Win 7 32 updates) its display had the same problems as the Jetway: extremely annoying, frequent, screen flickering. A check on the Intel support site showed a video driver listed for the DN2800MT board, dated Mar 8, 2012 -- 8.​14.​8.​1075. Installing it cured all of the flickering problems.

Interestingly, the latest driver listed under Intel's Desktop graphics controllers for the 3600 Series chip is 8.​14.​8.​1065, dated Jan 2, 2012. My hunch is that this driver will cure the Jetway of all its flickering glitches, too.

good! I'm really curious about temperatures of DN2800MT in a very small case completely fanless. do you have any way to measure the surface temperature of the CPU heat sink at full load ?

No need to do that... when sensors for the CPU are accessible via Speedfan, etc. My quick answer is that it is in a tiny fanless case, and in normal usage yesterday afternoon, I never saw any of the temps (probably board and CPU) go above ~52C. CPU hovered in the 40s C.

Not great, but not terrible either.

Details for International Efficiency Marking Protocol for External Power Supplies are at Energy Star. (link tp PDF at bottom of page) http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?fus ... rs.showEPS

class IV has maximum ≥ 0.85 (85%) efficiency at >50W. Below that, it is lower -- defined by this formula: ≥ 0.09 x Ln(Pno)+0.5

class V has ≥87% efficiency at >50W; below 50w, the formula is...
Standard: ≥ [0.0626 * Ln (Pno)] + 0.622
Low Voltage: ≥ [0.0750 * Ln (Pno)] + 0.561

Ln = the natural logarithm
Pno = Nameplate Output Power (ie,rated power)

Not sure why they made it this complex to figure out.

Thanks! I appreciate yours' hard work.
That said, are all motherboards using this adapter in the review? No offense, just curious to see fair comparison.

No, I'm afraid not. It's very difficult to maintain the same system components for testing over the 6 year span that comparison covers, over the variety of power requirements for them. That said, one glaring omission I just noticed in this comparison is the Intel D945GSEJT in the Morex T1610 case, powered directly (to on-board DC/DC converters) by an 80% eff. 60W 12VDC Seasonic adapter -- going back 2.5 years. The D945GSEJT was the first of the "Thin-ITX" boards which made DIY "systems" like the tiny, super-lower profile Morex possible, and the Jetway NF9C-2600, though not from Intel, obviously follows in the same low-height form. Link to that review: http://www.silentpcreview.com/Intel_D94 ... orex_T1610

The D945GSEJT w/ max 80% eff. 12VDC adapter pulled 11~12W at idle and 18W at max load. This is substantially lower than any of the boards in the above comparison, and remember that the adapter for the 17W idle Jetway is 85% max eff. Admittedly, the old D945GSEJT could not play HD video w/o help, but a Broadcom Hardware Decoder BCM970012 PCIe Mini Card which enabled the board for HD video only added 1W at idle and increased max power to just 20W (playing HD video or max CPU/GPU load.)

For those seeking a new energy "Thin-ITX" champ, the Intel DN2800MT I mentioned in an earlier post is a much more likely candidate.

Thanks for your reply! Mike!
I do anticipate future Intel brand ATOM boards as Intel brand boards tend to be very frugal in terms of power consumption.

@ MikeC, are you likely to do a review comparing the Jetway with the Intel board, or indeed any of the other Thin ITX boards? The Intel DH61AG board is also very energy efficient, maybe not far off the Atom at idle. Some useful discussion on this thread, and I've added info on other Thin ITX boards, some of which are OEM only, probably destined for All-In-Ones...