Intel Pineview review and Jetway mini-ITX

Conclusion

Intel's Atom is still poor for anything but the most basic of uses. The romance with a CPU equivalent to others we perennially turn our noses up at has to stop - Atom is a rubbish CPU for a conventional 2010 PC.

Even when Ion 2 arrives, Atom systems will still provide a fundamentally slow processing backbone with limited use. Atom is therefore only acceptable for basic netbooks for those people who are happy with surfing a bit of internet, answering an email, yet want more battery life. And, to be fair, Pineview looks like it'll make that kind of limited-demand computing a bit better.

The thing is, while 70+ million might be happy playing hours of Farmville on a 1,024 x 600 screen, we're not.

The step back in GPU hardware of the Pineview platform is quite frankly phenomenal considering the pressure Intel is under to improve this area. Ion-2 with, Nvidia's Optimus technology should address this, but at a cost of battery life for notebooks and we're unlikely to see Optimus on the desktop.

For our readers, we suggest Atom's benefit will be niche applications - Smoothwall and other customisable firewalls, for example, or NAS boxes/media servers perhaps. Both of these applications are where Jetway's IPC boards can be applied.


Providing you can find a power brick and Molex power adapter, the NC96 with its onboard DC-DC conversion will provide a great base for an exceptionally low power, always on device. However, we're not sure if we'd recommend stringing four hard drives from a single Molex on the board: the startup power draw could well burn out the socket. By that stretch of the imagination, the board isn't a great choice for a NAS box or media server, whereas its brother - the NC94 - has a PCI Express x16 slot (x4 electrical) that's a good fit for a RAID card. OK, an Atom won't be enough to handle the throughput from something from LSI, but a Home Server doesn't need to handle the I/O from 1,000 people, include advanced caching techniques or deliver multi-GB/sec of data.

The serious let-down is the limitation of 10/100 Ethernet ports that feature on both boards. With the only possible usage scenarios we can think of based around home networking, Gigabit Networking is cheap and 100Mbit (~8MB/sec after overheads) is just not going to cut it these days. That's also not forgetting the need for alternative cooling required, because the fans are far, far too noisy for any small office or your home.

Like its earlier NC92, Jetway's NC94 and NC96 motherboards, just like Intel's Pine Trail CPUs and Pineview platform, might have some niche uses, but the package is still a long way from being desirable.

Jetway NC94-D510-LF

• Performance
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• -
• -
• -
• 5/10

• Features
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• -
• -
• 6/10

• Overall
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• -
• -
• -
• 5/10

Jetway NC96-D410-LF

• Performance
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• -
• -
• -
• 5/10

• Features
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• -
• -
• 6/10

• Overall
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• -
• -
• -
• 5/10

Score Guide