Power Consumption

We enabled Cool'n'Quiet, set the power profile to Balanced under Vista and reset the BIOS to its default settings. The wattages listed are TDP - the maximum thermal overhead the CPU is designed to work in, not the "typical" value it works at, this is why the Gigabyte motherboard with Intel E4300 CPU appears lower power than the "45W" AMD Athlon X2 solutions.

Unsurprisingly the J&W comes out more power intensive though - it simply has more hardware on-board to power: an extra DIMM, sideport memory and "extra" chipset for example (since the GeForce 7100 and 8200 are single chip IGPs). The J&W does match the micro ATX Gigabyte motherboard that uses the same chipset and also has plenty of features as well.

Depending on the CPU used, the J&W uses eight to 13W more power under idle but only between two and 10W more under load compared to Jetway's mini-ITX board. Having said that though, it's almost identical to the Gigabyte 780G and Asus G35s - all of which use under 100W with one hard drive and one DVD drive. Naturally your mileage will vary depending on the PSU efficiency and extra hardware used.

Value and Experiences

After using this board for a few weeks now we've been through a few teething troubles, but all has turned out rosy in the end. For a while we had an issue of getting any video acceleration to work at all - the system would simply BSOD. We talked to J&W and discovered that it was an AMD driver issue and we were suggested a particular set of drivers (Catalyst 8.7) that covered all the AMD components in a single install.

AMD really needs to sort out its IGP/motherboard drivers because navigating through the current website to find what you need is incredibly confusing: do you look for AMD 780G? Radeon 3200 (since the other parts of the chipset are often already catered for by Vista)? Does it make a difference what southbridge I have?

With the correct driver and latest BIOS, everything ran perfectly well until we found the main heatsink overheated and locked up the system when we loaded it with video. J&W did warn of this, and while a small fan would be noisy and unappreciated, it would still be better than a system crashing - how many people will simply think the board is faulty and try to RMA it? Addendum 18th September 2008: This has now been corrected by J&W and the latest models shipping come with an optional fan for the northbridge.

So, with a bit of airflow over the board - everything was finally happy. You don't need high performance SO-DIMMs, but if you do decide to have fun and tweak the system it's quite happy with a bit of overvoltage and additional memory performance. Finding 1,066MHz SO-DIMMs for Phenoms (only the 65W 9350e or 9150e) is nigh on impossible though, even if the BIOS does cater for the option.

The initial presentation of the product is exceptional, the performance is very good and we're still particularly in favour of the AMD 780G chipset despite its limitations for things like LPCM 7.1 audio. The MINIX has all the features of a microATX board and more: it's full-HD capable with pretty much any dual core and can certainly handle a Blu-ray movie with £20 single core AMD CPU, yet it's a fraction of the size of every other motherboard so the mod potential is massive.

We are still trying to find out retailers for this board but J&W have told us that it is has a suggested retail price of US$189. On the face of it, that's certainly expensive - much more so than the Jetway JNC62K GeForce 8200 and the Intel DG45FC (Fly Creek) as both are between £80-100, but when compared with other Mini-ITX boards like EPIAs and considering not only the technology you're paying for as well as there are many other (more) expensive, niche Mini-ITX boards out there, it falls right in line.

If you're not overly size sensitive (but then lets face it, you wouldn't really be considering mini-ITX in the first place) we can't ignore the larger micro-ATX AMD 780G boards that are under half the price and often offer as many if not more features.

In addition, because an expensive CPU just isn't needed, the overall platform cost is arguably quite close to the Intel DG45FC board, and the J&W is still better featured as a home theatre board in terms of connectivity. In fact, we haven't found anything else designed to hit its niche so well - why should we put up with shoe horning industrial boards to fit our needs, or be forced to buy mini-ITX motherboards whose CPUs are un-upgradable?

Final Thoughts

It's certainly not perfect - the BIOS is mostly there but it really needs some work, it still needs some airflow on its passive heatsinks, and the AMD drivers are temperamental but these are minor irritations or teething troubles only. Once it's up and running it works great - we ran at least half a dozen CPUs in it without issue and even overclocked the SO-DIMMs with very little fuss.

Basically, its currently the best ultra-SFF solution you can buy for a HD-capable home theatre; its on-board audio is very good, it has oodles of connectivity and its performance is at least as good as the competition so if you're after new HTPC and you're under size constraints, stick the J&W MINIX 780G high on your list because we'd recommend it.

• Features
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• 10/10

• Performance
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• 8/10

• Value
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• -
• 7/10

• Overall
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• 9/10

What do these scores mean?