When the SoC plus a motherboard retails for around $90, and Intel lists the SoC as $82, you can imagine that the box contents are going to be extremely light. These motherboards only have two SATA ports, but both do have mini-PCIe and functionality headers (COM/USB) which might throw up a surprise or two. It would have been interesting if one of them offered a motherboard with WiFi for example.

In The Box: GIGABYTE J1900N-D3V

Manual
Driver Disk
Rear IO Shield
Two SATA Cables

In The Box: ASUS J1900I-C

Manual
Driver Disk
Rear IO Shield
Two SATA Cables

Many thanks to...

We must thank the following companies for kindly providing hardware for our test beds:

Thank you to OCZ for providing us with PSUs and SSDs.
Thank you to G.Skill for providing us with memory.
Thank you to Corsair for providing us with an AX1200i PSU and a Corsair H80i CLC.
Thank you to MSI for providing us with the NVIDIA GTX 770 Lightning GPUs.
Thank you to Rosewill for providing us with PSUs and RK-9100 keyboards.
Thank you to ASRock for providing us with some IO testing kit.
Thank you to Cooler Master for providing us with Nepton 140XL CLCs.

Test Setup

Test Setup
Processor Intel Celeron J1900 (Bay Trail-D)
Quad Core, 2.0 GHz (2.4 GHz Turbo)
Motherboards GIGABYTE J1900N-D3V
ASUS J1900I-C
Cooling Integrated Passive Coolers
Memory G.Skill SO-DIMM DDR3L-1600 9-9-9
Memory Settings Stock
Video Drivers Intel
Hard Drive OCZ Vertex 3 240 GB
Case Open Test Bed
Operating System Windows 7 64-bit SP1
USB 2/3 Testing OCZ Vertex 3 240 GB
ASUS J1900I-C BIOS and Software System Benchmarks
Comments Locked

60 Comments

View All Comments

  • Antronman - Friday, October 17, 2014 - link

    I'd much rather be using a Kabini for some mainstream browsing and multimedia.
  • speculatrix - Friday, October 17, 2014 - link

    the first UEFI firmware on the Gigabyte motherboard was just awful, the followup F2 was slightly better, but to make it useable you need the F3 version. Updating can be a problem, I started a discussion about it here:
    http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums/viewtopic.php...

    there was a big discussion about baytrail motherboards on the silentpcreview forums, here:
    http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums/viewtopic.php...
  • rstuart - Saturday, October 18, 2014 - link

    "Load Delta Power Consumption" is just jargon - and you don't define it. Googling it return just one page of hits. If they are any indication, it total draw from the wall.

    But even that figure is meaningless unless you tell us what conditions the test was done under. Eg, was the test setup identical for all systems tested, not just the motherboards in question. What power supply was used? What does load was the system put under?

    Also, a comparison of the system at idle versus under load would be interesting. Most of the time my systems are idle.
  • Bonesdad - Saturday, October 18, 2014 - link

    White titled on a white background...
  • valkyrie743 - Sunday, October 19, 2014 - link

    the ASUS J1900I-C looks like nice for a simple XBMC box.
  • Mvoigt - Sunday, October 19, 2014 - link

    Just slap an Zotac geforce 610 PCI 1gb ddr3 in the pci slot and you got and decent machine for sligthly older games.... :) even never ones at low res....
  • evident - Sunday, October 19, 2014 - link

    I would have loved to see J2900 numbers in this article as well to represent the top end of these bay trails. I still don't care what anyone says, I still don't feel this is a viable platform for granny's daily web surfing and farmville activities, let alone a HTPC. you just cant justify miserable performance when you can step up to a sandy bridge celeron for way better performance.

    if you look at real world pricing for J1900 based machines, the only winners are the pc box manufacturers charging $200-300 for this garbage. you can easily pick up a haswell pentium or last generation ivy bridge pentium for that price if you wait for a clearance.
  • abufrejoval - Tuesday, October 21, 2014 - link

    I'd love to see those, too. Even more I'd like to be able to actually purchase J2900 hardware, but I have yet to see any.
  • dealcorn - Monday, October 20, 2014 - link

    Several posters have suggested that Kabini may be more attractive than Silvermont. In the real world where companies report revenues quarterly, Baytrail-D and Baytrail-M took significant market share from AMD during the second quarter of 2014. The trend accelerated as Atom claimed increased market share during the third quarter and I believe Dr. Su projects this share loss trend will continue in the fourth quarter. The reasons this occurred are not discussed in the Article but are sort of obvious if you look at real word pricing and real word consumer preferences.

    Today, Newegg will sell you a AMD’s Kabini 5350 for $65 and a BIOSTAR AM1MHP motherboard with Gb Ethernet for $32 making the 5350 a $97 platform. Alternately, you could buy a ASRock Q1900M with a single Gb Ethernet connection for $70. The real world 5350 platform costs $27 (38%) more. I would argue that ASRock is a preferred brand name over Biostar and perceived brand quality does matter at the low end. Obviously, the 5350 has better graphics for gaming but the J1900 supports 1080p video or better in all major codecs. Because the J1900 is significantly cheaper and has fully adequate graphics for everyone but gamers, sales of the 5350 are limited to cheap dedicated gamers and the 5350 dominates the cheap dedicated gamers segment. Problem is, gamers tend not to be that cheap. For a few dollars more than $97 you can step up to a super gimped Intel big core solution with discrete graphics card and far greater game potential than the 5350 solution. In the real world, it does not help to dominate a market niche with trivial sales volume and the quarterly earning releases of AMD and Intel powerfully make this point.

    As a side note, the J1900 motherboards tested in the Article feature dual NIC's and that is an expensive feature in this price class. By way of contrast, Newegg sells no AM1 motherboards with dual NIC's. Because J1900 is very efficient, some folks leave them powered on 24/7 so they can act as a passively cooled firewall/router download station. Finally, Intel does not use contra-revenue with either Baytrail-D or Baytrail-M, These are full margin products. Anyone who asserts otherwise just got hit kinda hard with the stupid stick.
  • silverblue - Monday, October 20, 2014 - link

    I can buy a 5350 for about £40 and a Biostar AM1ML board for £20. An MSI J1900I costs a little under £60, so you can get into both for about the same price. I suppose it depends on features in the end.

    As it is, AMD should cut at least £5 off the RRP.

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now