I finally got around to trying out one the ASRock boards. I usually don't care about which RAM slot I'm using but I noticed the system only seems to boot when I put the RAM in the slot that lies in the best path for the convective airflow. I've got no video/KB connected so possibly it's something I could bypass by hitting a key.
Are your boards also refusing to work if you use the RAM slot that lies on the long side of the CPU heatsink and leave the other empty?

Also, does anyone have a quick way to stress-test the GPU? Preferably something that works in Linux and doesn't require a GUI. My understanding is that those chips support OpenCL but I have no idea how to get that to work.
If you only stress the CPU, the reported temperatures are quite low (with the J1800, they're a good bit lower than with the slower DN2800MT and it's ostensibly mobile CPU rated at 6.5W for instance). Subjectively, nothing feels very hot either. So I suspect one would need to stress the GPU to make an educated guess as to which fanless cases would comfortably accomodate these boards. I don't suppose ASRock has any documentation about that or even about recommended operating temperatures (I didn't bother to look)?

The GPU is very small part of the SoC, so I doubt it can add significant part of heat. Without display you can run some phoronix benchmarks like blogbench that seems to put a lot of load on the system.

I finally caved in and ordered the Gigabyte board for my home file server (which will be 5 years old later this year) is well overdue. Hopefully with the F3 bios and a bit of work it will run linux reliably, I don't care about accelerated video as it will mostly run headless.

--edit--
Ordered it at weekend from dabs.com who claimed to have stock, order is still being processed. sigh.
--edit2--
Their website still says 5 in stock, but the customer service person says their website shows their supplier's stock level and they don't have any in stock themselves. double sigh.

Can someone with an Asrock Q1900* test if ESXi 5.5 boots correctly? It is noot needed to install it on the hard drive, it can be booted directly from USB. Thanks in advance, I can give all the support needed, if needed just pm me.

I am guessing that all these Baytrail-D motherboards will be nearly identical in their core features - CPU, RAM, SATA and network, so if ESXi boots on one, it should boot on most. That said, you may have some fun with the variety of PCI, PCIe and additional network ports.
When I get my Gigabyte J1900 board I am happy to try booting it with ESXi off USB, PXE or hard drive.

I already tried the GB GA-J1900-D3V card (then returned it), that's why I was asking for the Asrock one.

For the Atom boards I tried (right now I'm using a D2700MUD) the results were quite various, even on the same CPU platform. One of the things that seemed to help a lot with the error I got with the Gigabyte (stuck at "Relocating modules and starting kernel") was putting the IGD minimum memory @ 16MB, sadly the GA-J1900-D3V does not allow to go below 64MB.
Perhaps using a discrete graphic card could help, but I did not have one in hand to try (not a PCI one anyway).

ASROCK Q1900DC-ITX will be soon available in Czech Republic. Price is 2662 CZK with VAT, which is around 97 Eur.

My only concern is, whether to buy Athlon 5350 + AsRock board for almost same price.
AMD seems to offer faster storage and 4K output for video.

That depends on whether you're going to have to compromise too much on power consumption, and whether you're going to find stable video drivers for the AMD graphics; personally I've had sufficient bad experiences of AMD/ATI I'd never buy a video card or a board with their video embedded.

The AMD board isn't fanless, is it? Even if it is, it's going to run hotter.

According to tests, AM1 seems to have even better power consumption, than Bay-Trail. Anyway both are around 10 W in idle, which is very nice


Quality of drivers is for sure problem for AMD, however I'm not sure if Intel is any better. I've seem what they've done to their Networking drivers in last years. According to tests it seems, that Radeon R3 has more performance, than Intel HD Graphics.

There is active cooling on stock cooler, however I think it can be cooled by passive sink only. (if not used for gaming purposes)

If you don't put a large heatsink on it, it will heat up quite a bit not only with gaming but with any load. If you're going to underclock to prevent that, you might as well buy something less powerful.
There are fanless AMD boards with factory-underclocked CPUs, you know. These are mobile parts to begin with (more efficient in theory) but look at how much they're underclocked!

Can you give me some examples of those boards? I can hardly find some board with 4x SATA, HDMI, DP and reasonable price.

I don't know why you'd want all that but the C60M1I ought not to be too expensive. The fanless Zacates such as the old Zotac used to be more expensive. Not that you should consider any of these boards. They're only an illustration of how difficult it is to cool AMDs passively.
If you want more performance you'd be better off trying to cool a cheap Ivy Bridge passively than an AMD. There are some factory-underclocked models fitted with fanless heatsinks but they're a bit more expensive.

I am eyeing on the Asrock Q1900DC as well but I wonder how I can power my harddrive without an ATX psu?

The Q1900DC has two sata power headers on the board which supply 12V and 5V for harddrives. It's not clear if the board comes with the cables.

And my second review/test is ready - Improving Celeron J1900 gaming performance by connecting external graphics card to PCIe x1 2.0 slot

Phoronix just compared the Windows vs Linux GPU performance
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=a ... ws81&num=1
the Windows drivers are consistently better by a modest margin over the Linux ones, however, it's not a total disaster.

meanwhile my Gigabyte J1900 motherboard has been doing sterling service since I swapped out my old Jetway n330 board as a home file server; it's noticeably quicker for everything. If I transcode a video from flv to xvid I get about four to five times the performance, so now I don't need to offload that to my core-i5 PC (Intel 4300U laptop).

Okay, after reading this thread I upgraded my home server to a Gigabyte GA-J1800N-D2H motherboard.

System components:
- GA-J1800N-D2H
- RAM: KINGSTON 2GB 1600MHz DDR3
- SSD: Kingston SSDnow 60GB (used for the OS so the data disk can spin down whenever possible)
- HDD: WD20EARS 2TB Green (data)
- PSU: Antec EA380 80-Plus

WIN8.1 pro installed flawlessly even with F2 bios. However I still upgraded to the F4 BIOS. WIN7 can be installed flawlessly using F4 BIOS, not with the F2 BIOS (installer hangs).

The WD data disk was not detected by WIN8's disk management, until I enabled hot-plugging for its SATA port in the BIOS.

The system is very responsive, I'm really surprised at how much power this little CPU offers for so little Watts It boots into the windows desktop in less than 15 seconds.

Some power consumption stats:
- idle in WIN8, WD harddisk in spindown: 15.5W AC, which is about 7.5W DC. [verified by efficiency measurement of PSU]
- idle in WIN8, WD harddisk spinning but heads retracted: 18.5W AC
- idle in WIN8, WD harddisk active: 22W AC

I'm very happy, I'll be saving up to 33W AC consumption compared to my previous home server which was based on an AMD Athlon X2 4850E.


PS. yes, I could still shave a few watts of the idle consumption by using a PicoPSU. But I'm using the Antec PSU to power other DC equipment as well (switches, router, LED lights) which lets the PSU run more efficiently.

I didn't know there was now F4 firmware for the J1800 board, so I hope that there will also be F4 firmware for the ga-j1900 too. I say firmware, because I'm trying to get into the correct habit of referring to UEFI boards as having firmware, rather than BIOSes

Interesting, thanks for posting. Are the power figures for a headless install or do you have monitor keyboard etc attached? For some reason these baytrail boards seem to have similar or even higher idle wattage than i3/i5 Haswells, although I guess thats down to the excellent power management Intel has in place these days.

Also, without wanting to derail the thread could could post something describing your multi use PSU (or even just a few pics)? Ive been interested in doing something like this for some time but havent had the confidence I wouldnt burn down my house trying it.

Those power figures are indeed headless. However, connecting a VGA monitor doesn't seem to make a difference. Keyboard and mouse add about 0.5W AC. Another power saving tip is disabling the Realtek audio chip in UEFI, I gained about 0.5W AC.

[OT]
The PSU setup is nothing special: it consists of four 4mm connectors on the back of the server (picture), connected to the PSU by means of a molex plug, providing 5V and 12V. Those 4mm connectors connect to a length of cable which runs to a small breakout box next to the modem/switches. (picture - the breakout box is the dusty little black box, 5V and 12V is supplied through the ethernet cables at the bottom). The LEDs are powered in a similar way.

I am surprised that it draws that much power in idle. I've been using an ivy-bridge i3 laptop as a download box / HTPC and the idle read is about 8.5W AC (measure using a Kill-A-Watt). I was going to build a J2900 box and I am a bit hesitated now.

What kind of laptop?? Is that running 24/7 and do you find it gets hot??

Ta

J

Acer E1-571G with i3-3110m and GT620M. To minimized the power draw I disabled the dedicated GFX, replaced HDD with an SSD and unplugged the optical drive. It's running about 12 hrs a day and never gets hot or loud unless I do gaming on it.

I bought the Asrock Q1900DC-ITX from Germany, not being able to find it in North America
in June 2014.

Configured same with 2X4GiB low voltage so-dimms and a Samsung TLC 250GB sata drive,
as well as a standard sata DVD drive for loading the OS.
Loaded with Centos 6.2 for use as a small file server.

DC voltage spec is 9 to 19V. I found the board required at least 10 while running the DVD
drive, but would run on 9 otherwise. Power draw in idle state is about 8 Watts. It will
serve files happily at 10 W.

For the use intended, basic file serving, code development, etc. the cpu power seems entirely
adequate, rather snappy actually.

Mostly, I am impressed with it. I have just two complaints.
1) DC power conversion seems to be handled by two converter chips installed near the DC jack.
These chips get quite hot in normal use, even with the board at idle. They are very hot to the touch;
I have to think a substantial fraction of the idle power is dissipated by these two chips. I worry
about the capacitors mounted near them and wonder if I should affix heat sinks to them.
2) The sata plugs on the mobo are set such that usual 90 degree cable cannot be used without
covering the adjacent socket. This is obviously minor but I wish they could have been installed
the other way around.

In configuration, one should give serious consideration to a mpcie SSD as the sata
data and power cables sprawl all over with such a clean and dainty little board.

I am impressed with what it does with very little power.

Centos 6.2 panic'd repeatedly until I disabled onboard usb, this is some sort of driver issue. Maybe
6.5 works better, I dunno.

Phil

I finally installed Windows on my ASRock J1800 board and there's a difference of 14C between the CPU temperatures when you run Furmark on top of Prime95. Considering the temperatures I'm talking about, that's not trivial: the CPU reached 66C and the board 57C in spite of pretty good conditions (ISK110 which is roomier and more open than many cases, moderate ambient temperature).
On the other hand, the CPU is very efficient and CPU load doesn't heat up the board a whole lot. So much for the theory that you can tell the heat output of the components of a SoC by size...

Hi! I'd like to buy one of these: couple of questions:
1) Can you read part numbers for the couple of 'hot' DC/DC converter ICs?
2) I have an old Dell AC/DC 120W 20V brick; do you think I can use it? Mobo manual states 19V+/- 10%...should be OK
3) Can you share shops links in Germany?
Tnx

http://geizhals.de/asrock-q1900dc-itx-9 ... 11762.html

German price search page.


means something like Delivery to other countries on request.