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  • xistic - Friday, October 24, 2014 - link

    How does something like this compare to an old Intel Core Duo with 4GB of RAM? I've got a headless linux box I'm looking to replace. Currently the Core Duo is overkill for what I use it for. (Team Fortress 2 MvM, jabber, Rhodecode and Teamspeak servers all with low traffic. Seriously, never get above 20% CPU and 25% RAM consumed.)
  • kpb321 - Friday, October 24, 2014 - link

    You can see for yourself at:
    http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1227?vs=60

    Single threaded performance seems to be ~half that of a Core Duo but as the J1900 is a quad core chip it's multi-threaded performance is a little bit better.
  • lioncat55 - Friday, October 24, 2014 - link

    While I don't have any numbers that is not the right chip. You are looking at a Core 2 Duo and not a Core Due. You are also looking at a Core 2 Duo part that has a higher base clock than the J1900 has boost.

    A better look would be the http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1227?vs=64. Its bast clock is 2.4Ghz.
  • xistic - Friday, October 24, 2014 - link

    I forgot there was a difference. It's a Core 2 Duo.
  • xistic - Friday, October 24, 2014 - link

    And thank you, this answers my question.
  • LostAlone - Saturday, October 25, 2014 - link

    Personally I wouldn't be looking to spend anything to replace a headless box unless you need more performance. I mean, I know that having a tower instead of micro-box isn't ideal, but you'd be throwing away all the benefits of having a more powerful system too, like being able to handle more traffic (say you invite a bunch of people to you TS server for a specific event) and whatever else you may possibly want to do in the future.

    A core 2 duo is a nice chip, and certainly would be up for doing some light media serving and transcoding duties if that's what you want to do, probably the most stressful home-server activities. Maybe that's not what you want to do right now, but having the choice to add those capabilities is great.

    From my point of view moving to a system this underpowered would strictly be a downgrade. It'll cost you money to do the same exact thing you are doing now, and has none of the potential for expansion.
  • Ratman6161 - Sunday, October 26, 2014 - link

    I don't know what they will charge for this if/when it ever comes to the US but the MSRP listed in the story is more than I paid for an Ivy Bridge i3 model a couple of years ago. Could probably get an i3 for the same or not much more and would probably be a better choice unless you needed that ability to do an internal 2.5 inch drive.
  • zepi - Friday, October 24, 2014 - link

    I'm trying to read the network performance evaluation, but i can only find that your router is 5GHz prefered, but nowhere does it state if this particular Realtek supports it or not.

    Often in cities 2.4GHz spectrum is totally blocked and any 5GHz is faster than 3x3 2.4GHz resticted 802.11n setup.

    Ofc this is not a problem in suburbs. Basically in most places i've lived over the last few years 2.4GHz is pretty much unusable with huge packet loss and speeds down to single digit megabits due to interference from neighbours. 5GHz band is less problematic as it mostly stays inside owners walls.
  • Ryan Smith - Friday, October 24, 2014 - link

    The Realtek radio is 2.4GHz only.
  • ganeshts - Friday, October 24, 2014 - link

    This is a 2.4 GHz only single band mPCIe card. Realtek RTL8723BE

    Will make a note to add single or dual band nature in the table on the first page in future articles
  • nathanddrews - Friday, October 24, 2014 - link

    A dual-NIC version of this would make an incredible pfSense router.
  • The_Assimilator - Saturday, October 25, 2014 - link

    I had the exact same thought. I hope Gigabyte reads these comments and decides to produce such a device.
  • abufrejoval - Sunday, October 26, 2014 - link

    The GIGABYTE GA-J1900N-D3V (recently reviewed here) has those two ports and would fit that niche as well. There is also lots of USB Ethernet adapters out there, which at 100Mbit/USB 2.0 might be good enough for your uplink and there is also Gbit/USB 3.0 variants which may be a little trickier in terms of device drivers.
  • artk2219 - Friday, October 24, 2014 - link

    I just wanted to post this here. Dualcore sandy bridge cpu, m-itx, m-pcie, it can run a laptop display, msata, runs off a 19v powersupply from a dell or hp, and uses sodimms in case you have any laptop memory around. For 52 dollars.

    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
  • bliq00 - Friday, October 24, 2014 - link

    how does that run a laptop display?
  • jdav - Friday, October 24, 2014 - link

    LVDS monitor ribbon interface in the corner by the mSATA interface. Most laptop displays use this format to connect to the motherboard. The white 8-pin header to the left of that I believe is for the display power.
  • Jambe - Friday, October 24, 2014 - link

    So this variant (with the J1900) will never come to NA?

    :(
  • alhopper - Saturday, October 25, 2014 - link

    What's the point of this review if the product cannot be purchased?
  • OrphanageExplosion - Saturday, October 25, 2014 - link

    Because Anandtech does have readers outside of North America?
  • Tikcus9666 - Saturday, October 25, 2014 - link

    Because the world is much much bigger than the USA
  • nathanddrews - Tuesday, October 28, 2014 - link

    Size doesn't matter.
  • vailr - Saturday, October 25, 2014 - link

    This review is too scatterbrained. The reviewer says "Intel HD Graphics" but doesn't specify which version; "not being sold in the North American market", yet also says: "a US power cord".
    Wut? Anand is seeing his old web site go down the drain.
  • nickb64 - Sunday, October 26, 2014 - link

    "Intel HD Graphics" is exactly what Intel calls it. No number or anything.

    http://ark.intel.com/products/78867/Intel-Celeron-...
  • sjprg2 - Saturday, October 25, 2014 - link

    Why would any company make the SSD controller a SATA 2 instead of a SATA 3?
    also a 5 GHZ wireless would make this a great remote backup.
  • abufrejoval - Sunday, October 26, 2014 - link

    You'd need to ask Intel that: This is a system on chip or SoC and SATA comes off that chip.
    Intel might say that SATA 2 saves power and that might even be true. More likely they are just afraid they'll sell less mainline CPUs and chipsets if these SoC were too powerful.

    In practice I find the difference only important on jobs I wouldn't want to do on this system anyway.

    The wireless card isn't soldered on: In theory you could get another card that supports 5GHz for minimal bucks.
  • nothing immortal - Sunday, October 26, 2014 - link

    No kabini result? i want to see this cheap amd chip compared with this expensive intel box. Really, it should be there.
  • abufrejoval - Sunday, October 26, 2014 - link

    As much as I love the BRIX in terms of form factor, case look and sturdyness etc. I could never quite fathom their choice of notebook type active cooling systems, especially since they are full metal cases (top cover also has metal under a cover which is plastic for "looks").

    Well of course these notebook fans are cheap, being mass produced in incredible numbers, but they get far too noisy under load. I tried a 15Watt Haswell BRIX and had to return it heartbroken: I loved the little box, but I couldn't stand the constant fan speed changes, which gave me far too much feedback on just how hard the CPU was working.

    I run the GIGABYTE GA-J1900N-D3V which is completely passive and I thus know it's possible to design a passive box in the BRIX form factor.

    And if by all means they need to share a fan design with the bigger boxes, why can't they put a bigger one in, say something Noctua, which never more than whispers?

    Although one of the biggest attractions of these BayTrails is that you can design systems all passive which just run forever somewhere in a corner completely silent and sealed with no chance of choking on dust.

    BTW: I'm glad you finally measured clock speeds and power consumption! Yes, the J1900 (and the J1800 likewise) *never* run at anything but turbo clocks under load. The "official" clock rates are simply bogus numbers, perhaps designed to keep people away from these SoCs or to "manage performance expectations": With Intel everything is possible.

    Idle power clearly speaks for the BRIX and the integrated power supply, which is probably a far better match than the Pico-PSU and external 12V brick that I am using on the GIGABYTE GA-J1900N-D3V, which gives me 10/28 Watts on idle/full load.

    BTW: I've never noticed that a single DRAM channel limited the BayTrail SoCs in any way: Most likely that's because they only ever have a single channel DRAM interface anyway.

    And for Core 2 comparisons: I didn't run too many benchmarks but the J1900 at 2.41 GHz matched 80% of my QX9100 @ 2.40 GHz on all pure CPU benchmarks I tried (POVray and Cinebench R15 raytracing) at 28 vs. 65 Watts.

    If they managed to make this completely passive and silent this would be the perfect desktop. It runs pretty much every x86 OS right out the box with decent but not awe inspiring performance at 1920x1200 or below. Video at least on Windows with is great with all that hardware support from an Intel HD VPU including QuickSync and 3D is limited only by speed not by feature availability, which often enough is all you want (e.g. Compiz 3D effects on Linux).

    Can't expect gaming performance from a system costing less and using less power than an entry level grapics card.
  • chizow - Monday, October 27, 2014 - link

    @Ganesh T S: did you get a chance to test this with WMC? Specifically, high bitrate CableCard streams where you change the resolution from windowed to fullscreen or portrait/landscape. My Asus T100 wasn't able to handle this well at all so I ultimately stopped using it as a WMC device and finally sold it. It would hang for up to 60 minutes changing context/resolution and I could never figure out if it was the slow eMMC storage, the GPU, single-channel RAM or what.

    I wanted to get a Celeron NUC for an HTPC but ultimately this scared me off and I went with the i3 NUC instead, which cost more than 2x as much.
  • zlandar - Tuesday, October 28, 2014 - link

    I know Celeron is just a name but every time I've used Intel chips below i3 the performance sucks.

    Rather pay the price premium for an i3 than risk being unhappy with a stuttering NUC.

    The comparison with other NUCs seem way off as you mostly compared it against i5/i7 systems and no i3. It's like stacking a HTPC video card against a mid to high range gaming video card.
  • leonhk1 - Wednesday, October 29, 2014 - link

    Hi,
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    Interested buyer should E-mail me at: megas83@yahoo.co.uk
  • LoneWolf15 - Thursday, October 30, 2014 - link

    I would buy one of these --or another Bay Trail NUC in this price range --if they made a good faith effort to support Linux. This particular system config is tailor-made for an appliance style box. But I've read time and time again about NUC-style vendors (this particular Gigabyte model, and others) saying "We only support Windows on this unit". I'm a Windows guy and all, but the use I'd have for this is like an Asterisk server at home for VoIP or something of that type.
  • ArushaMan - Saturday, September 19, 2015 - link

    Has anyone upgraded one of these from Win7 to Win8/Win10? I made one attempt and it failed with no explanation. I suspect it has to do with the BIOS setting which requires you to set it for Win7 or Win8 at first install. I installed and activated Win7 OEM, using the Legacy setting. Is the trick to change the setting to Win8 when it re-boots during the Win10 install?
  • BorgDog - Thursday, October 8, 2015 - link

    Just got mine yesterday and installed Win7 Starter then upgraded to Win10. Basically the first time windows reboots you need to press the Delete key repeatedly until it goes into Bios then change the setting from Windows 7 to Windows 8.1, then save and exit and it will go back into the Windows 10 install and finish that setup. So short answer, yes that is the trick.
  • andwan0 - Saturday, November 4, 2017 - link

    Can the 1900 play HD movie/films @ 1080 or 720 smoothly directly from the HDD or SSD?
  • ansva - Thursday, April 23, 2020 - link

    How does this compare to a Raspberry pi 4?

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