Jetway JNC62K (GeForce 8200 on mini-ITX)

Jetway’s JNC62K mini-ITX motherboard

Right, let’s get something straight before we start – don’t just read the Jetway name and come to an instant conclusion, at least bear with us for the review. I mean, I would be speaking for many if Jetway wasn’t the first motherboard manufacturer of choice as the previous associations of “cheap and nasty” might have stung a few of you before. From the outset I want to explain that this isn't the way the mini-ITX JNC62K has been designed. That’s not to say there isn’t a level of no-frills about it, it's clearly not an Asus RoG board, but it has done for us what it was designed to do.

Generally speaking, building a mini-ITX board is pretty difficult since there just isn’t the luxury of space and EMI issues are more difficult to deal with. It can be counteracted with extra PCB layers but that adds to the cost of production, and in this respect Jetway has done well to use a "normal" six layers on its JNC62K motherboard.

We received a first batch, white box sample from Jetway – a retail version will come with a retail box and package containing a user's manual, an HDMI-to-DVI converter, one SATA Cable, one IDE Cable, a Driver CD and an I/O shield. While this feels quite basic considering there are four SATA ports and no USB brackets, it’s actually a lot better than what we’ve seen in some of the recent VIA EPIA retail boxes we’ve seen.


Jetway will also include the option of a 3.5cm low profile CPU heatsink for 45W CPUs to complement the board should you want to use a low profile case. Let’s hope the above UK stores stock it because this is something we’ve had huge trouble with in the past when we’ve wanted to review low profile HTPC cases with anything other than a VIA EPIA motherboard inside.

Features

• 17cm x 17cm – mini-ITX form factor
  
• AMD socket AM2 and AM2+ CPUs – Phenom X4 and X3, Athlon X2, Athlon 64 and Sempron. Maximum CPU TDP support is 65W.
  
• Nvidia GeForce 8200 IGP (MCP78S)
  
• VGA and DVI outputs – DVI to HDMI includes HDCP
  
• One DDR2 socket supporting 800/1,066MHz memory (depending on CPU used) up to 2GB in quantity
  
• Four SATA 3Gbps ports
  
• One IDE socket
  
• One PCI slot
  
• Realtek ALC883 value 7.1 channel High-Definition audio codec
  
• Realtek RTL811B PCI-Express Gigabit Ethernet
  
• Realtek RTL811C PHY Gigabit Ethernet
  
• Ten USB 2.0 ports (six on rear I/O, four through pin-outs)

This little thing is a monster – four SATA 3Gbps ports can offer some serious hard drive arrays, and with RAID 5 you’ve got the redundancy option too.