Jetway JNC62K (GeForce 8200 on mini-ITX)

Jetway JNC62K Layout (continued)

The CPU support is limited to 65W because there is only four phase power regulation included, so no current Phenoms can be used although there is a low power 65W 1.8GHz quad-core part on the cards at some point.

That’s not to say the board doesn’t use high quality sealed chokes and Fujistu solid aluminium capped capacitors across for everything.

There are even holes and space available to heatsink the eight MOSFETs if you feel the need – say you’ve wedged it into a small, hot space with very little airflow for example.

Under normal load or simple video playback they really shouldn't need cooling though; even with only the airflow from the CPU fan, both the MOSFETs and sealed chokes were only just warm to touch in this instance. However, when the system was put under heavy load with a 65W CPU during our stress test, the power regulation hardware became exceptionally hot to touch.


The CPU socket has the standard amount of space, however we tried to use a Thermaltake heatsink that slightly overlaps the edges and found it conflicts with DIMMs that use large heatsinks like Corsair’s DHX or OCZ’s Reaper and Flex modules. A standard sized 2GB stick of Crucial Ballistix worked perfectly though.

Generally the layout is very good, although there’s not much you can do with such limited space. It looks pretty good too, at least for a green PCB it goes well with the all yellow and black dotted around the surface. One downside of this that wasn’t immediately obvious though was the fact that all the pin-outs are plain black, meaning you have to look closely which are the front panel pin-out, front panel audio and USB 2.0.

Nvidia’s GeForce 8200 chipset is passively cooled by a 40x37x30mm heatsink – while it’s undoubtedly taller than the heatsink on Gigabyte’s GA-MA78GM-S2H micro-ATX motherboard that we looked at when 780G launched, its dimensions are barely bigger than the chipset package itself.

Just a 20-pin ATX and 4-pin EPS 12V power connector are needed, so either use an older PSU or make sure it has a 20+4-pin connector. Usually lower power units and especially the DC-DC units come with 20-pin connectors anyway, but some are just designed for EPIA boards and miss the 4-pin EPS 12V power connector, so check before you buy.

On the back there’s the metal CPU bracket and a few of the chipsets that required surface mounting somewhere.

Rear I/O

One entire side is packed with rear I/O connectors – it’s really well featured for a mini-ITX board:

• Six USB 2.0 ports
  
• PS2 keyboard (no mouse)
  
• Two RS232 serial ports
  
• Six 3.5mm analogue audio jacks
  
• VGA output
  
• DVI output with optional HDMI adapter

The two RS232 serial ports are there because it’s technically an industrial board, but the six USB 2.0 ports and a full complement of 3.5mm audio jacks are nice features that make up for the space ‘wasted’ by the two RS232 ports. There’s also both VGA and DVI/HDMI outputs and the good news is that both can be used together, meaning you can use multiple monitors. However, the downside is that one of these has to be analogue – that’s a chipset limitation though, just like the fact the DVI is only single link.