GIGABYTE GA-J1800N-D2H Review: Dual Core Bay Trail-D at $69
by Ian Cutress on December 26, 2014 11:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Intel
- Bay Trail
GIGABYTE J1800N-D2H In The Box
I recently took delivery of a £1300 notebook that came with a charger and a small quick start manual, so under that assumption (and speaking to Brett about his HP Stream 11 review and the bundle therein) it is unlikely to expect more from a $200 notebook. Similarly, $69 motherboard/SoC combinations are essentially stripped bare. At this price point the manufacturer is selling a utility rather than an experience
Nevertheless the J1800N-D2H includes the following:
Driver CD
Manual
Rear IO Shield
Two SATA cables
In the land of $69, two SATA cables is a luxury.
Many thanks to...
We must thank the following companies for kindly providing hardware for our test bed:
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.
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 J1800 (Bay Trail-D) Dual Core, 2.41 GHz (2.58 GHz Turbo) |
| Motherboards | GIGABYTE J1800N-D2H |
| Cooling | Integrated Passive Coolers |
| Memory | G.Skill SO-DIMM DDR3L-1600 9-9-9 2x4GB |
| 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 |
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lioncat55 - Friday, December 26, 2014 - link
When ever I see a system like this I want to build a Plex server. But it never seems like the CPU is enough.LoneWolf15 - Friday, December 26, 2014 - link
@lioncat55 - Asrock makes the Q2900-ITX , a J2900 Bay Trail quad core. You'll probably find it a little more suitable.I went Core i3-3225 at the time I built my HTPC due to the HD4000 graphics. Still working well running XBMC Gotham.
xbenny - Saturday, December 27, 2014 - link
@lioncat55 - I hear you man I'm in the same quest check out this review of Q2900-ITX @techspot http://www.techspot.com/review/882-intel-pentium-j... @LoneWolf - still not enough for on-the-fly-transcoding for Plex serverStevoLincolnite - Saturday, December 27, 2014 - link
Give it time.These chips aren't even in the same league as the Core 2 processors from 6-7 years ago in terms of performance-per-clock, but they do use a tiny fraction of the energy.
They're certainly a big step up from the old Atoms.
Might start getting competitive with Nahelem class chips in the next 3-4 years, which is when things would start to get interesting.
barleyguy - Monday, December 29, 2014 - link
You can get an AMD FX-6300 for $89, and throw it on a cheap motherboard. It works great for Plex; the 6 integer cores are surprisingly good at transcoding. I'm doing 1080p full Bluray transcoded to 20 Mbps for playback across powerline ethernet.It does use way more electricity than one of these though.
Another decent Plex server is the NVidia Jetson board. There's an accelerated Plex build for it. It's almost $200, but includes the CPU, RAM, and 16 GB of storage, so it's basically turnkey. The power usage on that is about 7 watts typical and 15 watts peak, not counting the hard drive the movies are on. (This option does require some Linux knowledge. You need to update Linux for Tegra and set up Plex server as chroot.)
$.02
KWIE - Wednesday, January 7, 2015 - link
@lioncat55 - I have a FreeNAS box with Plex Server running inside a jail on an Asrock Q1900-ITX, basically the quad core version of this, but with lower per-core frequency. There are other versions available also including one with DC-in. The above model also has 4 SATA ports (vital for me with a 4 drive ZFS setup). I boot from a Sandisk Cruzer Fit USB drive with no issues.I have one large, slow fan blowing over the drives in the entire case and never have any heat issues. Very, very happy with it... and now considering building another for a family member.
dragosmp - Friday, December 26, 2014 - link
Great review, I like the comparison with HP's Stream. To push it further I would say in this particular case it's obvious one should pick up the OEM made, but what about if someone wants a quad BT? Then for 20$ more someone can get twice the performance for 5% in system cost. It's endless reasoning, but I just wanted to point out this bitbill.rookard - Friday, December 26, 2014 - link
Agreed. I have the ASRock Q1900M (quad-core, full size DIMMs, a few more x1 slots and a full x16 (x1 wired) slot) and that allows for quite a bit more flexibility. It's still a very small board - same depth as ITX, just a little more width. The extra x1 slots could allow for some extra sata connectivity, the x16 could allow for a more powerful gpu (the intel solution onboard is marginal at best - only 4EU's).Overall though, armed with a SSD (Samsung 830) it's more than adequate for HTPC duty.
ddriver - Friday, December 26, 2014 - link
The lack of performance is otherworldly.I guess gaming benches were a logical component of the review for this product, seeing how it is definitely intended for such tasks. /sarcasm
To hell with stuff like media playback or a file server, workloads such a product is actually suited for. Who cares how this product works for stuff it is actually usable for.
Gigaplex - Friday, December 26, 2014 - link
Insufficient SATA ports for this to be used as a file server.