Holiday Guide Update and a quick look at the J&W A785GMT-Extreme
by Gary Key on November 30, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Gary's First Looks
Raja and I have been working on a Holiday Guide the past couple of weeks and hopefully we will complete it this week. Our emphasis has been on finding components that offer a great bang for the buck even though they might not be the absolute best in their class. While we will offer our opinions on what is best in class, our focus has been on balanced performance, support, and features versus cost. A really good example is the ASRock X58 and P55 Extreme boards that offer a great set of features and performance for excellent pricing in each category. While they will not satisfy the needs of extreme overclockers, for the other 98% of us, they offer a really great value. Just like the Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P, MSI 790FX-GD70, and ASUS M4A77TD Pro have in their respective categories.
That said, there are a lot of great choices currently in the lower end market, especially in the AMD 785G camp. The 785G boards are just terrific values for building a SOHO centric platform that will be primarily used for office applications, Internet, communications, and casual gaming. This is especially true when paired up with an Athlon II based processor. Really, current Intel S775 processors in the sub $100 market teamed with a G41 based board just do not have what it takes to compete with the AMD products in this price sector. Intel has a competitive answer coming early next year, but until then AMD is the wise choice.
J&W is one of our favorite second tier suppliers and they have a winner in the 785G market with their new JW-A785GMT-Extreme board. This product compares very favorably with the Gigabyte and ASUS 785G offerings and actually makes for a great SFF gaming platform for those who just use a single graphics card. Our testing to date with a Phenom II X4 965BE and AMD HD 5850 leads us to believe this a great combination for the gamer centric user on a budget or as an all around gaming/media center with a HD 5770 and Athlon II X2 550BE.
The JW-A785GMT-Extreme features a great five-phase PWM design that fully supports 140W processors, Realtek ALC 888 8-channel HD audio, Realtek RTL8111D Gigabit LAN, IEEE-1394a via the JMicron JMB381 chipset, 12 USB 2.0 ports, HDMI/DVI/VGA output, 16GB DDR3 support, six SATA 3G ports via the SB710, and on-board graphics capability thanks to the update HD 4200 IG engine with full DX10.1 and UVD 2.0 support. J&W also throws in 128MB of DDR3 side port memory. There are three fan headers, with the CPU fan header having speed and temperature settings.
The layout of the board is very good and includes an LED Debug display along with power on and reset buttons.
Initial performance ranks right with the Gigabyte and ASUS 785G boards when it comes to overclocking. Our results with the 965BE were superb as the board allowed stock voltage overclocks to 3.87GHz with our GSkill Ripjaws DDR3-1600 4GB C8 kit reaching DDR3-1720 at 9-9-9-24 2T timings.
Bumping up the CPU VID to 1.43V resulted in 24/7 stable 4.07GHz clocks under Windows 7 64-bit with NB speeds at 2.86GHz, something we have not been able to do under a 64-bit operating system until now. The BIOS is geared for the overclocker with significant settings available for memory and voltage tuning. That said, memory timings are not as aggressive past 1600 as the Gigabyte or ASUS boards but this board typically clocked our CPU about 70MHz higher at like voltage settings. We will take a further look at this board in the near future but for now, anyone looking for a very high quality 785G motherboard should place the JW-A785GMT-Extreme at the top of their list.
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AgoeZ - Sunday, January 3, 2010 - link
Did this motherboard support for the latest Phenom II X4 955BE C3? I've been looked to the official JW website but I didn't found that the motherboard's BIOS supported the latest C3's processor.Thanks for the answer! :D
kenwong - Sunday, December 6, 2009 - link
I think none of the existing brands would like to see this brand to enter to the US market at alltyaiyama - Monday, December 14, 2009 - link
Last weekend I have conducted DIY PC workshop in Tokyo, Japan. Three of four people have tried to assemble J&W M/B JW-A785GMT-Extreme. And one person assembled Gigabyte GA-MA785GT-UD3H. One of J&W failed due to bad BIOS ROM. Then he went to replace it with a new one to Akihabara. He came back with another JW-A785GMT-Extreme. He assembled it again. This time it failed to produce DVI output.I can say that Anandtech got the cream of puff M/B tested hard at J&W before shipment. True, the design of M/B is very good considering Micro ATX factor, but I doubt about the skills of technicians, and Q/C people over there.
Thus I need to meet him to assemble a successful JW-A785GMT-Extreme this coming Wednesday. We may need a couple more of this one to replace. But who cares we are near Akihabara, and can replace it within 2 weeks if there are initial defaults.
Anyway at this time 2 out of 4 of JW-A785GMT-Extreme are bad. It's a coin toss situation. Good luck to all of you who are not near Akihabara.
kenwong - Monday, December 14, 2009 - link
The board has 2 BIOS ROMs, do you see that? This is quite strange because:1.) Even if the 1st ROM failed, the 2nd ROM can be utilized to boot;
2.) the 2nd ROM can be used to recover the 1st ROM, there is a recovery mode;
why returning the board without conducting these steps? very simple indeed.
and if the DVI failed, the HDMI would failed also because both came out from the chipset.
kenwong - Monday, December 14, 2009 - link
and thus, in my opinion, for the 1st case the board need not to be returned certainly because the board has "DUAL BIOS" w/ recovery feature.while for the 2nd case, if it's caused by the chipset failure or damage during transportation, it has to be returned for sure. However, such problems shouldn't cause by QC because as far as I know J&W does 4 QC checks on every board. I believe most vendors conduct very well QC but DOA (dead of arrival) is still unavoidable as they couldn't control how the boards will be treated after they left the factory. For example, you don't know how the courier guys would handle the cartons...
tyaiyama - Wednesday, December 16, 2009 - link
I know it has dual BIOS. But it kept recovering it for ever for the 1st failed M/B. Is it not recovering from 2nd BIOS? If not, where does it come from?I did not have a converter; thus I could not check HDMI port. But it probably failed.
He brought the 2nd failed M/B to the shop. The shop support people asked him to come back after 2 hours. He did. The shop confirmed that the 2nd one is also faulty. And we did not know how many failed M/B the shop used to come up "appear to be perfectly running" M/B. Anyway the shop took him inside the support section, and showed him a running M/B. Then they disassembled it. Finally he got a running M/B.
Viva Akiba! Where else in the world we can deal with this kind of product?
Yesterday he brought the M/B, and we tested by running Ubuntu 9.10. It seems good. Now I asked him to do memory testing. And he told me the interim report it's running properly so far.
kenwong - Tuesday, January 26, 2010 - link
got 2 returned boards with loosened HDMI switch jumper, so you know why...LoneWolf15 - Wednesday, December 2, 2009 - link
Where can we find it?NewEgg doesn't list the JW-A785GMT-Extreme. I did a Google search just by the name, and so far have come up with nothing. I also have no guidelines for price, since I couldn't find any domestic (US) vendors for it.
It looks like this board isn't available for purchase yet.
AndroidVageta - Wednesday, December 2, 2009 - link
Where in the hell can this be purchased? I mean, I'm a long time PC hard ware enthusiast and I've never even heard of J&W! Let alone seen anything from them...this review is pointless to say the least...LoneWolf15 - Wednesday, December 2, 2009 - link
I don't think it's J&W, I think it's JW --as in JetWay.That said, to mention a board as part of a "Holiday Recommendation" article when they're not even available in North America was, IMO, a real mistake.