Bay-trail motherboards

All about them.

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speculatrix
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Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by speculatrix » Fri Feb 14, 2014 10:23 am

clarry wrote: these CPUs have been at a standstill with no remarkable improvements in either TDP or performance; just look any comparison of Atom 330 to the newer D2xxx parts.
yes, very much this. I have a home fileserver with an Atom n330 in it, and really want to upgrade it to something more powerful yet more power efficient. If these baytrail-D/silvermont atoms are all they are cracked up to be, I can't get one soon enough.
My n330 server's been running for over four years now, and is well overdue replacement. The entire server (motherboard, ram, mirrored drives, efficient PSU) cost about £300, but has probably eaten the same amount in electrical costs.

Esben
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Location: Denmark

Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by Esben » Fri Feb 14, 2014 10:50 am

Are you using Media Classic Home Cinema with hardware acceleration? Which codec for video/audio decompression?

speculatrix
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Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by speculatrix » Fri Feb 14, 2014 3:30 pm

I asked one UK supplier about miniitx boards using the new silvermont atom and they said they are expecting Jetway to announce a board soon. As soon as I hear anything I'll check back here.

chittu
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Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by chittu » Sun Feb 16, 2014 4:16 am

I ordered supermicro X10SBA and I'll update you guys about performance. I need help for getting accessories

power brick
Can you suggest me one? I need to power up 4 x SATA drive and X10SBA has 4pin 12v DC input.

RAM
Can you suggest me a power efficient one? I'm thinking to go for 1 x 4GB RAM instead 2 x 2GB RAM

HDD
Decided to go for 5400rpm drive (4TB or 3TB)

bastiaan
Posts: 98
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Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by bastiaan » Sun Feb 16, 2014 12:24 pm

These passively-cooled motherboards are really cool. I hope SPCR will be reviewing some soon, because I'm quite interested in how they stack up with regards to cooling (do I need case fans?) and power consumption.

speculatrix
Posts: 72
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Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by speculatrix » Sun Feb 16, 2014 1:24 pm

@chittu

You need to calculate the peak total power of motherboard, ram, drives and options and also the current required for each voltage... this isn't too easy to do. Once you know the total power and individual currents, you can choose a PSU.
Many cheaper power supplies can't actually manage to sustain their maximum rated power for too long, it's definitely worth paying extra for a high quality one which is more efficient (wastes less power, generates less heat, handles worse power surges before getting damaged, generates less electrical interference).

If you're going for low energy, then consider carefully about choosing the WD "Green" drives, they have a fairly short idle timeout, and will spin down and park heads, and there's a relatively low number of times they will do that before they self destruct. You can tweak the idle timeout or disable it. I have a mirrored pair on my n330-atom jetway-motherboarded server running such drives, I built it 4.5 years ago and they've been running all that time without incident and I turned off idle sleep. I used a high quality 150W (IIRC) PSU from LinITX for that.
Last edited by speculatrix on Sun Feb 16, 2014 1:36 pm, edited 1 time in total.

bastiaan
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Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by bastiaan » Sun Feb 16, 2014 1:36 pm

If you can afford it you could also consider getting two 1.5-2tb 2.5" drives, which usually have about 0.5W idle power consumption each.

chittu
Posts: 3
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Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by chittu » Sun Feb 16, 2014 2:24 pm

@ speculatrix
thanks, I could choose a picopsu (may be 80w sufficient), but the supermicro mb has 12v DC input (4-pin), i.e., I can directly power the mb with a 4-pin power brick and find a way to power up the hdd.

I thought I don't need a psu like picopsu! am I dump here? :shock:

@ bastiaan
thanks for mentioning the 2.5" inch drives they r quite expensive :evil: though they r the best to save power

3.5" WD Green 4 TB SATA Hard Drives ( WD40EZRX)
Power Dissipation
Read/Write 4.50 Watts
Idle 3.30 Watts
Standby 0.40 Watts
Sleep 0.40 Watts

2.5" WD Green 2TB ( WD20NPVX)
Power Dissipation
Read/Write 1.7 Watts
Idle 0.80 Watts
Standby 0.20 Watts
Sleep 0.20 Watts

speculatrix
Posts: 72
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Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by speculatrix » Mon Feb 17, 2014 8:34 am

Phoronix benchmarked the N2820-based Intel NUC:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=a ... view&num=2

speculatrix
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Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by speculatrix » Wed Feb 19, 2014 6:13 am

there's a new Gigabyte miniITX board out now, looks good, it's a passively cooled celeron J1900:

dual LAN, twin DIMM, mini-PCIe slot, PCI slot, dual SATA, 2 x USB2, 4 x USB3, VGA and DVI, 2 serial,

http://www.gigabyte.com/products/produc ... id=4918#sp

I found price for pre-order at alternate.co.uk with the price £74 inc VAT (US$110 roughly). they also have the gigabyte GA-J1800N-D2H for pre-order priced at £52, and the MSI J1800I (unknown availability) for £57.

--edit-- PCI not mini PCI slot
--edit2-- pricing
--edit3-- gigabyte j1800 and MSI J1800I spotted,
Last edited by speculatrix on Wed Feb 19, 2014 7:59 am, edited 3 times in total.

bastiaan
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Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by bastiaan » Wed Feb 19, 2014 6:39 am

Looks good, except I could do with a few more SATA ports, instead of an ancient PCI slot.

Jakoob
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Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by Jakoob » Thu Feb 20, 2014 2:34 pm

speculatrix wrote:there's a new Gigabyte miniITX board out now, looks good, it's a passively cooled celeron J1900:
Thanks... Added to the first post

Jakoob
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Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by Jakoob » Thu Feb 20, 2014 2:46 pm

For those concerned, there is a test of SuperMicro X10SBA, it is in chinese or whatever, but important values are readable.

Idle: 12 W
Load by 1080p video: 18 W
Prime95: 19 W

I hope it is capable to play 1080p in smooth way, finally also listed in more shops. Price is a bit high, but this board can be turner into NAS+Router+HTPC :)

Link for the test: http://www.geocities.jp/hangaya_craft/p ... t_g28.html

bastiaan
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Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by bastiaan » Thu Feb 20, 2014 3:03 pm

Very interesting. In one test with the stock heatsink the CPU reached 83 ℃, which suggests to me that some sort of ventilation is still needed with this motherboard.

Jakoob
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Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by Jakoob » Thu Feb 20, 2014 3:13 pm

I plan to connect 4-5 HDDs, so some small case is out of the game, therefore some 120 mm silent fan on the back of the case working with the temperature sensors can hopefully keep the board temperatures in normal.

Cheddoleum
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Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by Cheddoleum » Sat Feb 22, 2014 9:27 am

I've been running Ubuntu 13.10 on the X10SBA in a Chenbro ES34169 for a day or so with no additional airflow apart from the drive cooling fans. In this case the motherboard and drive compartments are separated by a wall so there's no direct air current over the mobo, but I've always found with this case that there are enough internal openings that you get enough air exchange to keep a passive heatsink pretty cool.

So far it looks like a little bit of airflow goes a long way with this chip/sink, despite how tiny it is.

With the ambient room temp at 68F, my CPU temps range from 36C at idle to about 44C under moderate load. (Interestingly when I ran the case with the cover off for a day; i.e. no moving air but not enclosed, it would hit CPU temps of maybe 49C under moderate load.)

I have not tried really stress testing it but given its 10W thermal envelope and its performance in still air I think it's going to be just fine -- I have a 60mm CPU cooling fan standing by ready to hook up to the board headers to use as an intake for the mobo compartment, it ever needs it, but at this point I'm starting to think I won't even bother.

piglover
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Location: California

Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by piglover » Sun Feb 23, 2014 10:08 pm

Cheddoleum wrote:I've been running Ubuntu 13.10 on the X10SBA in a Chenbro ES34169 for a day or so with no additional airflow apart from the drive cooling fans. In this case the motherboard and drive compartments are separated by a wall so there's no direct air current over the mobo, but I've always found with this case that there are enough internal openings that you get enough air exchange to keep a passive heatsink pretty cool.

So far it looks like a little bit of airflow goes a long way with this chip/sink, despite how tiny it is.

With the ambient room temp at 68F, my CPU temps range from 36C at idle to about 44C under moderate load. (Interestingly when I ran the case with the cover off for a day; i.e. no moving air but not enclosed, it would hit CPU temps of maybe 49C under moderate load.)

I have not tried really stress testing it but given its 10W thermal envelope and its performance in still air I think it's going to be just fine -- I have a 60mm CPU cooling fan standing by ready to hook up to the board headers to use as an intake for the mobo compartment, it ever needs it, but at this point I'm starting to think I won't even bother.
Your too modest. You should at least give folks a link to your instructions on getting this to work. Very simple stuff, really. See here: http://forums.servethehome.com/processo ... #post28536.

Can also confirm that XBMC seems reasonably happy on the X10SBA under Ubuntu 13.10 (now that I've finally got it loaded).

Thank you and well done.
Last edited by piglover on Mon Feb 24, 2014 3:26 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Cheddoleum
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Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by Cheddoleum » Mon Feb 24, 2014 9:24 am

Thanks, but it's like a 100 meter relay where the previous guy ran 98 meters and I did at most the last 2. All the credit belongs to a user called paperWastage over on xda-developers.com who worked it all out, including building the 32bit efi image.

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2500078

And to you for identifying the problem so clearly so I would know what to look for. All I did is realize that his solution would apply to this board and write down some steps to getting a working installation on it.
Last edited by Cheddoleum on Mon Feb 24, 2014 7:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.

speculatrix
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Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by speculatrix » Mon Feb 24, 2014 3:05 pm

Impulse Corp now have the ASRock IMB-150 for ordering at £136+vat (US$226 at current exchange rates) for the J1900 version, and £142+vat for the N2820 version. http://www.impulse-corp.co.uk/products/ ... mb_150.htm

That seems quite pricey, I think the Supermicro would be a safer bet in terms of reliability, documentation and longevity of support/drivers etc.

harcalion
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Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by harcalion » Tue Feb 25, 2014 5:38 am

I think enough days have passed since my disappointment and I can finally write my experiences with the SuperMicro board (X10SBA).
I bought it from sona.de and filled it with 8 GB of RAM and also 8 TB of disks (4x2TB) and a little SSD with Windows 8.1.

Pros:
- Windows 8.1 runs very well and is way more fluid than my ION (Atom D510+Geforce GT220).
- EFI environment is useful even if there is no documentation for it (you have to use generic Intel EFI documentation).
- Power usage (with a SeaSonic 350W PSU) was about 43 W. This includes 4 spinny drives, 1 SSD, 1 LG BR/HD-DVD combo drive and the VFD display of the Antec case.

Cons:
- Will not play Blu-rays or HD-DVD flawlessly from disc. Framerate was about 10-15 frame/s compared to the occasional stuttering with the ION setup. This was the deal breaker for me.
- Finding drivers is difficult as piglover stated. By the time I installed the thing (10th of February) there were official Intel graphics drivers.
- The hard drives, that were in a JBOD setup in the original configuration (only way to use them all with the 4 onboard SATAs of the old Zotac motherboard), did not maintain the JBOD since the Marvell controller on the SM does not support JBOD. Perhaps there is some RAID boot-up menu that I missed or some tool from Marvell that I didn't install, but I don't think so. Because of this, I couldn't test XBMC with MKVs, WMVs and other video files.

I went back to my old ION setup upgrading to 4 GB of RAM and a Geforce GT630 (rev. 2 -> incredible efficiency). The Blu-rays still stutter a little but I can live with that. Total power usage is between 50 and 63 W.

piglover
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Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by piglover » Tue Feb 25, 2014 7:13 am

I had the same problem trying to play blu-ray under windows 8.1 on this board. Couldn't get them to play without stutter under XBMC, VLC or any other player. DVD was ok but it wouldn't hold the frame rate required for Blu-ray.

Blu-ray plays perfectly running Linux, Ubuntu 13.10, XBMC.

I'm guessing the windows issues are driver related. All of the Windows drivers are still marked Beta in the release notes (except the video driver, which is marked as an Alpha release).

It's still early testing for me since I just got the Linux/XBMC config set up Sunday evening, but so far it seems happy.

Jakoob
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Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by Jakoob » Tue Feb 25, 2014 3:51 pm

Hi,
I would like to ask owners of SuperMicro X10SBA board for consultation about the PSU. I would like use this board with 4-5 drives (4x 3,5 HDD + 1x SSD for system).
What would be the best power supply chain PicoPSU or traditional ATX?

I guess the system will idle under 20 Watts, yet the problem will be start, when all drives + motherboard may ask for more than 100 W.

What is your experience and how do you power your board?

Thanks Jakub

bastiaan
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Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by bastiaan » Tue Feb 25, 2014 4:21 pm

Jakoob wrote:I guess the system will idle under 20 Watts, yet the problem will be start, when all drives + motherboard may ask for more than 100 W.
Some drives support Power-Up In Standby (I think WD and HGST drives do). That might reduce your peak load sufficiently to use a 80W PicoPSU.

Cheddoleum
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Location: Pacific NW, USA

Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by Cheddoleum » Tue Feb 25, 2014 9:12 pm

Jakoob wrote:Hi,
I would like to ask owners of SuperMicro X10SBA board for consultation about the PSU. I would like use this board with 4-5 drives (4x 3,5 HDD + 1x SSD for system).
What would be the best power supply chain PicoPSU or traditional ATX?
Seems like this is a common question about the PicoPSU: whether it's really suited to the heavy mechanical loads of multiple HDD's spinning up. It's not really a Bay Trail question.

I have only one experience with the PicoPSU: using one to power a 17w Via Epia board and 3 Seagate 500GB 3.5" drives. Despite the fact that the peak demand should theoretically not have exceeded about 55w, the PicoPSU burned out in a few months.

Granted this is a sample of one and there could have been any of a number of causes. But personally I would only use a PicoPSU again for an embedded system using SSDs or maybe one or two laptop drives at the most. Once you start spinning up great big steel flywheels, you move from theory to brute mechanical reality. Just my two cents based on exactly one experience, so take it for what it's worth.

Jakoob
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Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by Jakoob » Wed Feb 26, 2014 1:47 am

Cheddoleum wrote:But personally I would only use a PicoPSU again for an embedded system using SSDs or maybe one or two laptop drives at the most. Once you start spinning up great big steel flywheels, you move from theory to brute mechanical reality. Just my two cents based on exactly one experience, so take it for what it's worth.
Thank you for sharing your experience with PicoPSU, I'm aware that in case of server it is better to use some professional hardware, however which ATX power supply to use for system that will operate under 50 W? I'm not an expert in this field, but I'm afraid that usage of some 200 - 300 W PSU will lead to extra Watts consumed just because it is used in range with low effectiveness.

speculatrix
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Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by speculatrix » Wed Feb 26, 2014 3:09 am

Jakoob wrote:
Cheddoleum wrote: I'm afraid that usage of some 200 - 300 W PSU will lead to extra Watts consumed just because it is used in range with low effectiveness.
I recently installed a 760W Corsair Platinum+ PSU which promises 90% efficiency:
http://www.corsair.com/en-gb/ax760-atx- ... odular-psu
so if your computer draws, say, 60 watts, then the PSU will draw nearly 67W from the mains. At this kind of power draw it doesn't even need to spin its fans.

You have to consider the efficiency of the picoPSU along with the power brick that drives it:
http://www.silentpcreview.com/article601-page3.html
at 60W output, you're getting 84% efficiency, so you're drawing nearly 72W from the mains. You've now got a two device solution, less reliability/quality too, and much worse peak performance.

--edit--
OK, so that PSU is massively overkill, but how about an efficient Seasonic 360W?
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/power-sup ... 766-9.html

--edit2-- fixed the link to the corsair website
Last edited by speculatrix on Thu Feb 27, 2014 1:55 am, edited 2 times in total.

piglover
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Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by piglover » Wed Feb 26, 2014 7:48 pm

speculatrix wrote:
Jakoob wrote:
Cheddoleum wrote: I'm afraid that usage of some 200 - 300 W PSU will lead to extra Watts consumed just because it is used in range with low effectiveness.
I recently installed a 760W Corsair Platinum+ PSU which promises 90% efficiency:
http://www.corsair.com/en/power-supply- ... r-psu.html
so if your computer draws, say, 60 watts, then the PSU will draw nearly 67W from the mains. At this kind of power draw it doesn't even need to spin its fans.

You have to consider the efficiency of the picoPSU along with the power brick that drives it:
http://www.silentpcreview.com/article601-page3.html
at 60W output, you're getting 84% efficiency, so you're drawing nearly 72W from the mains. You've now got a two device solution, less reliability/quality too, and much worse peak performance.

--edit--
OK, so that PSU is massively overkill, but how about an efficient Seasonic 360W?
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/power-sup ... 766-9.html
80+ platinum certification requires 90% efficiency down to 20% of maximum PSU rating, after which most PSUs lose efficiency very rapidly. Some of the better ones hold high efficiency down to near 10% of peak load. This means that your Corsair at loads lower than 152w (or perhaps as low as 76 watts) is very unlikely to be anywhere close to that kind of efficiency. You'd have to look the efficiency curves from their 80+ cert report to really know.

I'm sure there must be 150-200w Gold/Platinum ATX/flexATX PSUs. If you don't want to use a pico/brick due to concern over spin up load then that is what you should be looking for if you want high efficiency at sub 30 watt nominal operating load. There are also several 1u server PSUs in this range with gold/platinum specs but they are normally tied to a specific chassis - supermicro has several choices.

FrankL
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Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by FrankL » Thu Feb 27, 2014 1:36 am

Actually with 88% efficiency, the Corsair doesn't do too bad at 10% load, but at 50W load it'll probably have quite a bit lower efficiency, probably somewhere between 82 and 88%.

Nevertheless, the Corsair is extremely expensive (for a PSU), and I'm sure there are much, MUCH cheaper and more efficient alternatives for sub-100W load (a good 12-19V brick + 120W PicoPSU?).

Other examples (from the 80plus Platinum-certified list) and with ATX12V formfactor:
Lenovo HKF1802-3A
HP D12-240P2A
Fujitsu S26113-E613-V70
Fujitsu CPB09-045C
Tiger Power TG12-0250-01

Vicotnik
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Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by Vicotnik » Thu Feb 27, 2014 2:13 am

Cheddoleum wrote:I have only one experience with the PicoPSU: using one to power a 17w Via Epia board and 3 Seagate 500GB 3.5" drives. Despite the fact that the peak demand should theoretically not have exceeded about 55w, the PicoPSU burned out in a few months.
I've powered most of my systems with picoPSUs for the last several years. I've never had any serious problems at all with them. It's important to remember that the picoPSU is only part of the power supply chain; the quality of the brick you pair it with matters.

That said, I would not recommend using a picoPSU for something like a file server with many 3.5" HDDs, even if it's possible.

speculatrix
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Re: Bay-trail motherboards

Post by speculatrix » Thu Feb 27, 2014 2:41 am

I fixed the link to the Corsair website item, and there's a graph showing efficiency over load.

I found a Gold+ 300W PSU on BeQuiet "TFX POWER 2" promising 88% efficiency at 20% load (60W), which would waste 9W:
http://www.bequiet.com/en/powersupply/496
price about £44 or US$73 or eur53.

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