J&W Minix 890GX-USB3 Review

Minix 890GX-USB3 BIOS

The BIOS is detailed enough in the essential areas, but is lacking in extra features: for example it's missing useful BIOS profile saving and an in-built BIOS update utility.


Still, the performance areas are appropriately kitted out, with real-time information on voltages, temperatures and clock speeds all present. There's a large set of memory timings available, and the overclocking option of up to 1,600MHz DDR3, as well as CPU, CPU-NB and PCI-Express clock frequency adjustments.


Unfortunately, the core unlocking didn’t work for us - we couldn't get either a Phenom II X3 or Athlon II X3 to boot after we selected the 'Auto' unlock setting, and we know the fourth cores work on both CPUs. Also, the fan control setting is limited to one header only, and strangely it's only 'Sys-Fan 1' not the CPU-fan.

Overclocking

The BIOS has no HyperTransport clock adjustment at all, other than clocking it lower than 200MHz. There's still some form of overclocking though, with plenty of voltage and CPU/CPU-NB multipliers to play with, but it's limited to Black Edition CPUs only. But even then, the overall end result was at best, not wonderful.

We managed to squeeze 3.5GHz from our Phenom II X3 720 Black Edition by using a multiplier of 17.5x and the standard 200MHzHTT. Meanwhile, we could push the memory controller (CPU-NB) to 2.4GHz by using a 12x multiplier and the standard 200MHz HTT. This overclock required a CPU voltage of 1.425V and a CPU-NB voltage of 1.375V.

We found that adding too much voltage would simply see the board not boot, so 3.5GHz was the highest we could push at a reasonably high voltage. The DDR3 SODIMM memory was also left to run at its SPD settings of 1,333MHz CL9. Despite the lack of HyperTransport control, all that left actually us with a positive spring in our step as it turned out to be a decent, stable overclock after some testing.

While our 2D overclocked testing ran fine, we found serious performance issues in our Crysis test. We dropped back the overclocked settings and found this crippling performance was still true even when we put the slightest of overclocks on our Phenom II X3 720 Black Edition.

We approached J&W to try to resolve the issue, and after some discussion the official answer to our enquiries was simply "we do not recommend overclocking on our mini-ITX platform". Odd that the BIOS supports it, then.

While J&W was happy to point out that the Minix is '6-core capable' it strenuously highlighted that outside of the 95W TDP limit the board might not behave normally, as we observed. This means that unlocking those extra cores, overclocking and all 6-core chips bar the Phenom II X6 1045T and Phenom II X6 'HDT55TWFK6DG' 1055T are off the shopping list.

This 95W TDP limitation was also the same maximum as the Asus M4A88T-I mini-ITX board, but we found no such overclocked performance issues with it. It’s worth noting that its VRM area ran extremely hot, and it's likely J&W wants to avoid this for the sake of reliability.

That said, we think the problem is more than that just a power issue, as even the slightest of overclocks shouldn't see such a hammering of performance. The bottom line is that even though the Minix offers overclocking, it could well be detrimental to do so.