Power Consumption

While the Jetway performs better, its power consumption is again higher by a few watts compared to the Shuttle X27-D when using the same hardware (including 285W Enermax PSU). It's 30W lower than the Sempron, which equates to around 45 percent, but in many cases the Sempron is over 45 percent faster so it's more efficient if you really need to get things done on a space and power budget, this is potentially the realm of an IPC board.

For everyday computing though, we're looking closer to the idle power consumption which benefits the Shuttle in this case, however a few watts difference are hardly going to break the bank and between a good and bad PSU this difference will be lost.

Conclusions

The performance of the Jetway board is generally better than the Shuttle X27-D but it's all relative - for a "fast enough" CPU a few seconds here and there aren't going to set the world on fire and for similar money a cheap AMD board and CPU can be bought and they will be a hell of a lot faster.

Having said that, Jetway appears to have made some nice improvements to the way it handles the memory controller on the 945GC northbridge, affording a more rounded memory performance with a much lower latency, given the limited memory bandwidth available. The low power side is particularly attractive, but again a few watts difference is not that much and easily dwarfed if an inappropriate or inefficient PSU is used.

We tried to test the audio but it suffered quite notable crosstalk between the stereo - we wouldn't recommend using it at all, and without S/PDIF that leaves you only to invest in other solutions to replace it entirely. Jetway doesn't go out of its way to offer additional basic hardware like Firewire either, and even a second display costs more.

Considering a single core Atom mini-ITX board can be had for all of £65, dual-core Atom based boards like the Jetway NC91 are notably more at £90. The NC92 offers the additional low profile upgrades, but also retails for more again at €110 which, given the current exchange rate, is likely the wrong side of £100.

At £100, we could get a Jetway JNC62K with £25 AMD Sempron processor and get a 30 to 50 percent performance boost, not to mention the numerous extra features on the JNC62K, for only £15 more. Unfortunately for Jetway and Intel's dual-core Atom, it's hard to justify the cost.

Final Thoughts

The Jetway NC92-330-LF is a nifty little board for basic applications and the fact it's upgradable and customisable, yet still low profile carves out a lovely little niche for it. Drop in the "three Gigabit Ethernet" adapter and it affords a huge potential as a low power network server, switch and firewall (after some copious software customising). Other than that, you can get the same or better elsewhere, for cheaper, so unless the Jetway NC92 particularly fills a niche that you can't find elsewhere, there are much better single core Atom products and it's bad value compared to the features of a Sempron setup.

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• 6/10

Score Guide