The Battle of Bay Trail-D: GIGABYTE J1900N-D3V and ASUS J1900I-C Reviewed
by Ian Cutress on October 17, 2014 10:00 AM ESTASUS J1900I-C Visual Inspection
The implementation of J1900 from ASUS differs a fair amount from GIGABYTE. Taking the board out of the box and the first thing to notice is the DRAM placement – instead of stacking one above the other, the modules are arranged such that one is above the SoC and one is to the right. There is still enough space for standard sized modules in both of these slots, and ASUS has even placed a fair amount of electronics underneath as well – the top DRAM slot has the Nuvoton SuperIO IC in that area, for example.
Similar to GIGABYTE, the motherboard has only two fan headers. The CPU header is below the socket beside the CR2032 battery, with the CHA header just to the left of the DRAM slot at the top. Both of these headers are 4-pin as well.
ASUS has prioritized different connectors around the edge, with the LPT header and COM header having priority at the top over the 4-pin CPU power connector which has a spot just to the left of middle nearer the SoC. This is an abysmal place for a 4-pin CPU power connector as it means any cable has to stretch over most of the board in order to reach. While making a neat layout might not be the ultimate goal for anyone using a Bay Trail motherboard, having this connector here might still disrupt airflow over the passive heatsink.
On the right hand side of the motherboard are our two SATA ports with the front panel header in yellow beside them and the internal buzzer nearby. The mini-PCIe port also rests in this bottom right corner beside the battery. Another difference to the GIGABYTE board will be the extra slot at the bottom – where GIGABYTE used a PCIe to PCI bridge, ASUS has implemented a PCIe 2.0 x1 slot instead. Perhaps unfortunately this is a closed ended PCIe 2.0 x1 slot, meaning that larger cards cannot be used. Above this is a TPM header.
Also on the board is the front audio header, powered from a Realtek ALC887-VC audio codec, and a USB 2.0 header behind the USB 3.0 on the rear panel.
The rear panel looks a bit bleak compared to the GIGABYTE, but this is because ASUS has decided to only use one COM header here and we get HDMI rather than a DVI-D. There is also only one network port, and the PS/2 connector is a joint connector. Where GIGABYTE uses a USB 3.0 hub to have four USB 3.0 ports, the J1900I-C only has one and four USB 2.0 ports instead.
Board Features
| ASUS J1900I-C | |
| Price | Link |
| Size | Mini-ITX |
| CPU Interface | Soldered |
| Chipset | Bay Trail-D Quad Core |
| Memory Slots | Two DDR3L SO-DIMM slots supporting up to 8GB Up to Dual Channel, 1333 MHz |
| Video Outputs | VGA (2560x1600 at 60Hz) HDMI (1920x1080 at 60 Hz) |
| Onboard LAN | Realtek 8111G |
| Onboard Audio | Realtek ALC887 |
| Expansion Slots | 1 x PCIe 2.0 x1 1 x Mini-PCIe |
| Onboard SATA/RAID | 2 x SATA 3 Gbps |
| USB 3.0 | 1 x USB 3.0 (SoC) [rear panel] |
| Onboard | 2 x SATA 1 x USB 2.0 Header 1 x LPT Header 1 x COM Header 1 x TPM Header 1 x mini-PCIe 2 x Fan Headers Front Panel Header Front Audio Header |
| Power Connectors | 1 x 24-pin ATX 1 x 4-pin CPU |
| Fan Headers | 1 x CPU (4-pin) 1 x CHA (4-pin) |
| IO Panel | 1 x PS/2 Combination Port 4 x USB 2.0 Ports 1 x USB 3.0 Ports 1 x Realtek Network Port HDMI VGA 1 x COM Port Audio Jacks |
| Product Page | Link |
One might ask why the J1900N-D3V costs less than the J1900I-C and yet has two NICs and four USB 3.0 ports. The J1900I-C combats this with a HDMI port (which will arguably be preferred), have a total of six USB 2.0 ports and a PCIe 2.0 x1 port, which should also be more versatile.
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Factory Factory - Friday, October 17, 2014 - link
I recently bought the ASRock J1900-ITX for a cheap NAS/HTPC/Steam Home Streaming build, and I have to say I'm really pleased with it. It seemed like a great midpoint between the Gigabyte and Asus boards here: visual BIOS with fan controls, two USB 3.0 ports in back plus a header, DVI and HDMI both, ALC892 with optical audio out, and - this was big for the NAS part - two extra ASMedia SATA ports and a PCIe x1 slot. I stuck another ASMedia-based SATA card in the PCIe slot and shoved the whole thing in a Bitfenix Prodigy with a bunch of drives.I almost went with an AM1 build, but I knew that all my media and SHS worked fine with my Bay Trail tablet, and an Athlon 5350 and ASRock AM1H-ITX just didn't seem compelling at $50 more for the set (or even $25 more for an AM1B-ITX) and extra power consumption.
jospoortvliet - Saturday, October 18, 2014 - link
Note that unless you load you system all the time, the AM1 might actually have saved you power - idle is lower in most tests than Intel.abufrejoval - Tuesday, October 21, 2014 - link
Could you please add AM1 idle power figures?I've measured 10Watt idle power behind the Pico-PSU power supply for the GIGABYTE J1900N-D3V and 6.3 Watt idle power on the GIGABYTE GA-J1800N-D2H which is the dual core edition without the 2nd GBit port, the Renesas USB 3 hub, serial ports etc.
Top power consumption in mixed Prime95, Furmark loads including some USB peripherals was 28 Watts for the Quad and 22 Watts for the Dual.
A Cruical C300 SSD was used in all cases, which doesn't yet support the nice power saving features of the newer Crucial SSDs.
I've tried shutting down unused peripheral devices (e.g. serial ports, 2nd Gbit Ethernet) and limiting the PCIe speed to gen1 to see whether that had any measurable impact: It didn't for idle.
I've been an AMD fan for decades, but I'm also trying to stay objective.
And with regards to idle power and AMD:
While I've measured surprisingly good idle power values for my first Trinity based APU (A10-5800K) as low as 18Watts with a high-end Asus motherboard, I'm shocked that my Kavery variant (A10-7850K) won't go below 30Watts all measured at behind the PSU.
At the same time I've measured Gigabyte Brix using Intel A7-4500U CPUs (GIGABYTE BRIX GB-BXi7H-4500U) which achieved 7.5 Watts of idle power, but beat the A10-5800K on pretty much every benchmark, CPU, GPU or both while it didn't exceed 25 Watts of system consumption (vs. 100 Watts for the AMD APU).
Again I'd love to be able to report otherwise, but compute power per Watt is AMD's high-end weakness and idle power the low-end weakness. Which one is more important depends on your use case but both are currently killer criteria.
abufrejoval - Tuesday, October 21, 2014 - link
The coolest thing about the ASrock boards is that they support 16GB of DRAM!Officially BayTrail tops out at 8GB but this may turn out to be more of a typical Intel "product castration" feature than a hardware limit. I haven't actually tried this on my GIGABYTE J1900N-D3V and would be afraid, that the BIOS might still limit that board to 8GB, but I've seen reports of people using ASRock Q1900B-ITX or ASRock Q1900M (includes a physical PCIe x16 slot with x1 connectivity) with 16GB of DRAM.
mjnhstyle100x - Friday, October 17, 2014 - link
The power consumption delta is something I do not like. I rather see the idle and load instead. The idle tells me how much my "nas/htpc" system will consume while doing nothing. the load tells me what is the absolute worse it will consume. this allows me to weigh the options better on power consumption basis, not the delta as that's not what is going to matter when the system is going to be idling for prolonged periods.The power consumption delta is something I do not like. I rather see the idle and load instead. The idle tells me how much my "nas/htpc" system will consume while doing nothing. the load tells me what is the absolute worse it will consume. this allows me to weigh the options better on power consumption basis, not the delta as that's not what is going to matter when the system is going to be idling for prolonged periods.
anactoraaron - Friday, October 17, 2014 - link
I decided to flip back and forth to compare the 3770 and 3740 Bay Trail T to the Bay Trail D... It's surprising how well the lower powered T fares when compared to the D.rootheday3 - Friday, October 17, 2014 - link
Table on page 1 says Baytrail graphics has 6 EUs => not correct; Baytrail only has 4EUs.duploxxx - Friday, October 17, 2014 - link
poor poor Bay-trail GPU, only half the performance of the competing AMD part. No wonder Intel lost money in that segment. You would expect that in 2014 Intel would understand that graphical is actually what you see and use these days. Even CPU it is not faster. This is again a moment like the brazos part, this was also way better then the atom, yet the djingle and oem designs forced everybody to buy that peace of crap because there were only few brazos designs.pitty that we dont see amd mullin tablets for x86, no those OEM yet have to get money to be convinced from intel because they know they get poor cpu designs............... and then complain the market does not accept these tablets, i have a crapy atom tablet here which now is just a radio station, no added value at all for anything else
consumers are losing as usual.
silverblue - Friday, October 17, 2014 - link
Apparently, the A6-6310 has a 15W TDP and a much faster GPU, using just over half the power of the 5350. Its base clock is 250MHz lower at 1.8GHz, but has a 2.4GHz turbo. The A5 is also enabled this time around.I'd really like to see one of these go through some thorough tests on AT; could make for a very interesting little machine. It's just a shame that they have gone for faster RAM over a dual channel controller, but the controller itself uses less power than before which is helpful.
abufrejoval - Tuesday, October 21, 2014 - link
Running PC games on the box isn't a lot of fun fore sure, but running Android x86 gave quite another picture: The GPU may not be able to hold water against PC GPUs but it's quite powerfull enough for any Android game and benchmark that I tried, at least at 1080p.Tons more CPU power than the Snapdragon 800 on my Galaxy Note 3 and GPU performance in the same region.
Sure the Snapdragon would never dream of burning 10Watts of power for that performance, but the GIGABYTE GA-J1900N-D3V isn't meant to be carried in your pocket. As high-end HDMI stick alternative, it doesn't do too badly.
Nor as a Windows or Linux desktop for office work.
With Lollipop we might see these use cases merge and full desktop office suites like Softmaker's will do the transition.