Just want to comment that I have recently bought the celeron version of this (Q1900) and although low power it does have some issues with the HDMI slot. Mine doesn't show the bios when using HDMI (it just shows corrupted gibberish) and when using Windows 8.1 and hooked up to my TV, the resolutions wouldn't show properly (1920x1080 would overscan with no option of fixing it, and other resolutions just wouldn't fit or would be fuzzy.) So now if I need the BIOS I have to use the VGA connection, and I run OpenELEC and Plex instead of Windows as this is a HTPC setup anyway. Just food for thought.
What do you mean by overscan? Is it drawing too big of a picture on the monitor? If so, there is the abilty to scale the picture in Intel's software. I have to do this (50%/50% scale) for my old SB i3 HTPC setup.
A lot of TVs discard 20-30 pixels from each edge of the picture and stretch the remainder to fill it. This is an artifact from the CRT era where calibration/etc limits meant that it was nearly impossible to get a picture that filled the entire visible glass exactly. Dead black space around the edge looked bad so the default setup was to expand it so the edges fell on glass behind the bezel.
It's still done with LCD TVs because in AB testing Joe Sixpack will say the one that has the image stretched to make everything slightly bigger looks better. If you're lucky, your TV will have at least one mode that doesn't do this; but it will rarely be explicitly labeled as such, meaning you'll have to try all of them sequentially to find it.
also, close captioning in the USA, and teletext service in the Europe, used "spare" lines on the raster scan to carry digital information, and relied on the TV overscan and flyback suppression to make the dots invisible.
Fanless *leans forward* Quad core *leans forward* With PCIe slot *leans forward* Bay Trail *closes page*
It's frustrating that intel or the manufacturers can't see the value in using one of the 11.5W Haswell parts in this sort of build. Paired with a cablecard tuner, it would be a truly excellent media center.
I just have no faith that an Atom can handle the recording/playback of the 4-6 cable streams I will be putting into it.
Regretfully, I think we are too small a niche for this sort of attention. I'm still using my 35W Sandy Bridge machine from 2011 or so, having never found a better price / performance / wattage combination. Every generation or so I find myself hoping something comes out, but by the time Intel decides to make their Y/U/T parts available, the next generation is already rolling out. Who knows - perhaps AMD might do something spectacular here ... those 25W Kabinis are slowly catching up to the performance of Intel on the compute side, and still have better graphics performance. Though WMC isn't hardware accelerated, VLC has seemed to benefit from hardware acceleration.
look at anand's recent review of i3 surface 3 pro. it uses 6/11W haswell (i3 4020Y). The i3 benches are roughly 180-200% of asus T100 (Z3740, 2W baytrail quads).
I think if you approach this analytically, the 10W baytrail is roughly comparable to 11W haswell. 1. Both have quicksync, at very similiar GPU clocks. 2. the J2900 is ~2.5GHz true quads, which should bench around 180% of Z3470 (~1.4Ghz quads). 3. the i3 4020Y is 1.5 Ghz no turbo duals with HT. again bench around 180-200% of Z3470.
in a nutshell, I would lean towards the bay-trails for cheap, heavily multithreaded application, non-customer facing GUI bound. Conversely, I'd go with the haswell Y series for tablets and other GUI based interaction devices.
Media server with 6 stream encodes... I am not quite sure any of these guys can handle it, heck I would even doubt my OC'd 4770K on handling this kind of workload smoothly.
I'm waiting for pricing on this. Or maybe something from Asus, I have their Atom mini-ITX board (with power brick) running for 4 years now. It's a bit dated.
ECS has a fanless J2900 board for $105, so I would assume that this one (with better features) to be at least $20 more. Toss in a fanless GTX 750 and it would make quite a capable, silent, little gaming machine.
I've currently got a 35w Ivy Bridge underclocked that can handle multiple concurrent streams well, but the fan is definitely kicking on to get it done. I just don't have faith that Bay Trail can handle stream encoding, plus Windows background processes, plus running the Media Center GUI. If it hurts an Ivy Bridge, I feel like you would probably need a Haswell to do this at a lower wattage. Hard to say without some tests *COUGH COUGH* Ian or Anand, looking at you *COUGH*
It's just frustrating because every year I'm hopeful that we will hit the holy grail (a truly fanless HTPC internal cabletuner box), and it seems perpetually a few years away.
I dunno why fanless it's such a omghuge deal when I can do that on a 3+ year old 2500K clocked all the way down to 1.6GHz at <10W and still beats the living crap out of baytrail. On an ITX board with full PCI-E 16x to boot.
I think you misunderstand the purpose of the board then. There are loads of small motherboards which can be fitted with Haswell CPUs, and I'm sure you could make one fanless or virtually fanless.
I don't think the PCIe slot can be x4, the specs don't seem to mention it neither. Baytrail-D/M only has 4 pcie lanes in total, so unless there's a pcie bridge chip (unlikely in this price bracket imho) a populated x16 slot would not only mean disabling the PCIe slots but disabling the (realtek) LAN as well which is probably unacceptable. So, my guess is the full sized PCIe slot is mostly there for looks, being x1 as well (the other possibility is that it's x2, disabling one of the other slots if populated).
if the price is right, this is a great way to make your own NAS. ReadyNAS 2 bay with a lot less specs cost you $400 with no drives. This will probably be $120 + $50 case and you got a value NAS
THIS. Put this inside a FD Node 304, which allows up to 6 3,5" HDs, and you have a very decent and stylish NAS for much less than a Synology 414 would cost. You could even install Xpenology on it if you want to have all the features Synology Nas have. Hell, you could install a full blown windows or linux and have a NAS + media player all in one, even steam streaming in a not so far future. Yeah you could do this before cheaply with amd chips, but with much higher power consumption. Only think missing is dual LAN for link aggregation.
I am in the process of building a NAS + media player/server. I had originally thought of using an i3-4150 and Gigabyte H97n m-ITX board. This seems like a much cheaper alternative ($120 cheaper to be exact). But with only two SATA3 ports, you think this would serve NAS well?
Well, I'm not an expert but It should work well enough. It's definitely faster than the CPUs NAS vendors use, and easier to upgrade ram etc. This board only has two SATA ports, but there are board s with 4 ports and a J1900, the predecessor to this ones, so they should be releasing more options with different connections soon. Yo could always add a pcie adapter with more SATA ports also, if you don't need the pcie port for anything else. The only use cases where I could see it struggling with would be transcoding of 1080p video, and if you were to use ZFS for your NAS drives with compression, and deduplication etc Which OS and which case were you looking to use?
SATA3 is only required if you use SSD. No HDDs can deliver 300MB/s+ of continuous bandwidth (most HDDs peak around 150MB/s lately, so even SATA1 would be barely limiting). The 4 SATA ports may be a restriction if you intend to have many drives, but SATA2 will not. Might even be interesting to have your OS drive on USB and then use all 4 ports for storage...
Thanks for the feedback guys. I planned to use the Fractal Design Node 304 and Ubuntu for the OS. Would likely only have one 1080p stream running at any one time. Good to know that only the number of SATA ports will be a limiting factor, not necessarily the SATA2 bandwidth; I'll take that into consideration. Could possibly boot from USB, install a SATA pci-e card and then have 6 storage drives.
The ITX board will more than likely cost a premium over the Micro-ATX board. It would appear that the ITX board is aimed at the HTPC and Media Server enthusiasts while the Micro-ATX board is aimed at the basic desktop "enthusiasts". (Think inexpensive office computer for Word and Outlook.)
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T-Net - Wednesday, August 6, 2014 - link
Just want to comment that I have recently bought the celeron version of this (Q1900) and although low power it does have some issues with the HDMI slot. Mine doesn't show the bios when using HDMI (it just shows corrupted gibberish) and when using Windows 8.1 and hooked up to my TV, the resolutions wouldn't show properly (1920x1080 would overscan with no option of fixing it, and other resolutions just wouldn't fit or would be fuzzy.) So now if I need the BIOS I have to use the VGA connection, and I run OpenELEC and Plex instead of Windows as this is a HTPC setup anyway. Just food for thought.know of fence - Thursday, August 7, 2014 - link
If your TV has a DVI-in using a 5$ HDMI to DVI adapter is sometimes the only way to fix overscan related issues.MonkeyPaw - Thursday, August 7, 2014 - link
What do you mean by overscan? Is it drawing too big of a picture on the monitor? If so, there is the abilty to scale the picture in Intel's software. I have to do this (50%/50% scale) for my old SB i3 HTPC setup.DanNeely - Thursday, August 7, 2014 - link
A lot of TVs discard 20-30 pixels from each edge of the picture and stretch the remainder to fill it. This is an artifact from the CRT era where calibration/etc limits meant that it was nearly impossible to get a picture that filled the entire visible glass exactly. Dead black space around the edge looked bad so the default setup was to expand it so the edges fell on glass behind the bezel.It's still done with LCD TVs because in AB testing Joe Sixpack will say the one that has the image stretched to make everything slightly bigger looks better. If you're lucky, your TV will have at least one mode that doesn't do this; but it will rarely be explicitly labeled as such, meaning you'll have to try all of them sequentially to find it.
speculatrix - Thursday, August 7, 2014 - link
also, close captioning in the USA, and teletext service in the Europe, used "spare" lines on the raster scan to carry digital information, and relied on the TV overscan and flyback suppression to make the dots invisible.Cygni - Wednesday, August 6, 2014 - link
Fanless*leans forward*
Quad core
*leans forward*
With PCIe slot
*leans forward*
Bay Trail
*closes page*
It's frustrating that intel or the manufacturers can't see the value in using one of the 11.5W Haswell parts in this sort of build. Paired with a cablecard tuner, it would be a truly excellent media center.
I just have no faith that an Atom can handle the recording/playback of the 4-6 cable streams I will be putting into it.
vnangia - Wednesday, August 6, 2014 - link
Regretfully, I think we are too small a niche for this sort of attention. I'm still using my 35W Sandy Bridge machine from 2011 or so, having never found a better price / performance / wattage combination. Every generation or so I find myself hoping something comes out, but by the time Intel decides to make their Y/U/T parts available, the next generation is already rolling out. Who knows - perhaps AMD might do something spectacular here ... those 25W Kabinis are slowly catching up to the performance of Intel on the compute side, and still have better graphics performance. Though WMC isn't hardware accelerated, VLC has seemed to benefit from hardware acceleration.StevoLincolnite - Tuesday, August 12, 2014 - link
WMC does have hardware acceleration, you may just have to enable it.PEJUman - Wednesday, August 6, 2014 - link
look at anand's recent review of i3 surface 3 pro. it uses 6/11W haswell (i3 4020Y). The i3 benches are roughly 180-200% of asus T100 (Z3740, 2W baytrail quads).I think if you approach this analytically, the 10W baytrail is roughly comparable to 11W haswell.
1. Both have quicksync, at very similiar GPU clocks.
2. the J2900 is ~2.5GHz true quads, which should bench around 180% of Z3470 (~1.4Ghz quads).
3. the i3 4020Y is 1.5 Ghz no turbo duals with HT. again bench around 180-200% of Z3470.
in a nutshell, I would lean towards the bay-trails for cheap, heavily multithreaded application, non-customer facing GUI bound. Conversely, I'd go with the haswell Y series for tablets and other GUI based interaction devices.
Media server with 6 stream encodes... I am not quite sure any of these guys can handle it, heck I would even doubt my OC'd 4770K on handling this kind of workload smoothly.
nirolf - Thursday, August 7, 2014 - link
You seem to be quite right:http://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare.php?cmp[]=2173&cmp[]=2128&cmp[]=2115
I'm waiting for pricing on this. Or maybe something from Asus, I have their Atom mini-ITX board (with power brick) running for 4 years now. It's a bit dated.
nathanddrews - Thursday, August 7, 2014 - link
ECS has a fanless J2900 board for $105, so I would assume that this one (with better features) to be at least $20 more. Toss in a fanless GTX 750 and it would make quite a capable, silent, little gaming machine.Cygni - Thursday, August 7, 2014 - link
I've currently got a 35w Ivy Bridge underclocked that can handle multiple concurrent streams well, but the fan is definitely kicking on to get it done. I just don't have faith that Bay Trail can handle stream encoding, plus Windows background processes, plus running the Media Center GUI. If it hurts an Ivy Bridge, I feel like you would probably need a Haswell to do this at a lower wattage. Hard to say without some tests *COUGH COUGH* Ian or Anand, looking at you *COUGH*It's just frustrating because every year I'm hopeful that we will hit the holy grail (a truly fanless HTPC internal cabletuner box), and it seems perpetually a few years away.
StrangerGuy - Thursday, August 7, 2014 - link
I dunno why fanless it's such a omghuge deal when I can do that on a 3+ year old 2500K clocked all the way down to 1.6GHz at <10W and still beats the living crap out of baytrail. On an ITX board with full PCI-E 16x to boot.speculatrix - Thursday, August 7, 2014 - link
I think you misunderstand the purpose of the board then. There are loads of small motherboards which can be fitted with Haswell CPUs, and I'm sure you could make one fanless or virtually fanless.mczak - Wednesday, August 6, 2014 - link
I don't think the PCIe slot can be x4, the specs don't seem to mention it neither. Baytrail-D/M only has 4 pcie lanes in total, so unless there's a pcie bridge chip (unlikely in this price bracket imho) a populated x16 slot would not only mean disabling the PCIe slots but disabling the (realtek) LAN as well which is probably unacceptable. So, my guess is the full sized PCIe slot is mostly there for looks, being x1 as well (the other possibility is that it's x2, disabling one of the other slots if populated).Morawka - Wednesday, August 6, 2014 - link
if the price is right, this is a great way to make your own NAS. ReadyNAS 2 bay with a lot less specs cost you $400 with no drives. This will probably be $120 + $50 case and you got a value NASasendra - Thursday, August 7, 2014 - link
THIS. Put this inside a FD Node 304, which allows up to 6 3,5" HDs, and you have a very decent and stylish NAS for much less than a Synology 414 would cost.You could even install Xpenology on it if you want to have all the features Synology Nas have.
Hell, you could install a full blown windows or linux and have a NAS + media player all in one, even steam streaming in a not so far future. Yeah you could do this before cheaply with amd chips, but with much higher power consumption.
Only think missing is dual LAN for link aggregation.
mcknig.k - Thursday, August 7, 2014 - link
I am in the process of building a NAS + media player/server. I had originally thought of using an i3-4150 and Gigabyte H97n m-ITX board. This seems like a much cheaper alternative ($120 cheaper to be exact). But with only two SATA3 ports, you think this would serve NAS well?asendra - Thursday, August 7, 2014 - link
Well, I'm not an expert but It should work well enough. It's definitely faster than the CPUs NAS vendors use, and easier to upgrade ram etc. This board only has two SATA ports, but there are board s with 4 ports and a J1900, the predecessor to this ones, so they should be releasing more options with different connections soon.Yo could always add a pcie adapter with more SATA ports also, if you don't need the pcie port for anything else.
The only use cases where I could see it struggling with would be transcoding of 1080p video, and if you were to use ZFS for your NAS drives with compression, and deduplication etc
Which OS and which case were you looking to use?
frenchy_2001 - Thursday, August 7, 2014 - link
SATA3 is only required if you use SSD. No HDDs can deliver 300MB/s+ of continuous bandwidth (most HDDs peak around 150MB/s lately, so even SATA1 would be barely limiting).The 4 SATA ports may be a restriction if you intend to have many drives, but SATA2 will not. Might even be interesting to have your OS drive on USB and then use all 4 ports for storage...
mcknig.k - Thursday, August 7, 2014 - link
Thanks for the feedback guys. I planned to use the Fractal Design Node 304 and Ubuntu for the OS. Would likely only have one 1080p stream running at any one time. Good to know that only the number of SATA ports will be a limiting factor, not necessarily the SATA2 bandwidth; I'll take that into consideration. Could possibly boot from USB, install a SATA pci-e card and then have 6 storage drives.zodiacsoulmate - Thursday, August 7, 2014 - link
i think this is really nice, that 10W baytrail very promising...wpcoe - Thursday, August 7, 2014 - link
The ITX board has four USB 3.0 ports, but the uATX only has one? What's up with that?Rampart19 - Tuesday, August 12, 2014 - link
The ITX board will more than likely cost a premium over the Micro-ATX board. It would appear that the ITX board is aimed at the HTPC and Media Server enthusiasts while the Micro-ATX board is aimed at the basic desktop "enthusiasts". (Think inexpensive office computer for Word and Outlook.)