Jetway NC96-510-LF Atom Based Motherboard

Introduction

Media center PC’s still plague the minds of all home enthusiasts looking to get the most out of their large, and most of the newly bought big screen TVs. Regardless of weather the HTPC (Home Theatre PC)  you are building is designed to accompany your 60′ High Definition ~ Ultra Everything Plasma TV or just breathe life into an old not so everything TV, it is important to maximize your bank for your buck. This means that the components of the system you are building have to be relatively inexpensive, space conscious, and still deliver the performance to play your 1080p flicks. Jetway has a series of boards intended to do just that. Today we will be taking a look at the NC96-510-LF, a Mini ITX board which will not break your budget.

Packaging

The motherboard arrived a package not much bigger than the board itself as can be seen from the pictures. The board came with a couple of goodies which were located in the compartment right above the the motherboard. The goodies included: Driver CD, Manual, Serial Cable, 2 x SATA Cables, and a Back-plate.

Specifications

While there are 2 of the 510-LF series boards that are available from Jetway, these boards have several key differences between them. The first difference is the processor cache, while the NC96-510-LF has 1024 MB of L2 Cache, the NC94-510-LF only has 512 MB.

CPU	INTEL ® Atom Processor D410 (45nm,FSB 667MHz,1.66GHz,512MB L2 Cache) INTEL ® Atom Processor D510 (45nm,FSB 667MHz, 1.66GHz,1024MB L2 Cache)
Chipset	INTEL® Atom Processor D510/D410 + NM10 Express Chipset Front Side Bus 667MHz
Memory	2 * 240-pin DIMM Sockets for un-buffered Single Channel DDR2 800/667 SDRAM up to 8 GB
Expansion Slots	1 * PCI slot
Storage	4 * Serial ATA2 3Gb/s connectors 1 * IDE connector
Audio	Realtek ALC662 6-Channel HD Audio CODEC
Ethernet LAN	RTL8111DL Gigabit LAN
USB	Embedded 7 * USB 2.0/1.1
Special Features	Intel Atom Processor D510/D410 Support DC FAN Support CPU Smart Fan
Rear Panel I/O	4 * USB 2.0/1.1 ports
	1 * PS/2 Mouse & 1 * Keyboard connector
	1 * RJ-45 port
	3 * Audio I/O ports ( Line-in, mic and line-out ) 1 * VGA port 1 * COM port 1 * Parallel port 1 * 12V DC in
Internal I / O	3 USB 2.0  ports 3 * NB / Chassis Fan connectors; 1 * 4-pin Power connector 1 * 18 bits single channel LVDS header 1 * AUDIO header /1* CD IN /1 * GPIO 1* RS232/RS422/RS485 connector 1 * MINI PCI-E connector
BIOS	AMI 8MB DPI Flash ROM
Functional	ATM, Automation, medical Equipment, Security, Networking, POS, General Application, Gaming Machine, Transportation
Certificate	CE, FCC, RoHS,Eup
Form Factor	Mini ITX Form Factor(17cmx17cm)

A Closer Look

The motherboard contains several differences from its younger brother, the NC94-510-LF. Firstly is the power plug. While the NC94 has a 20 pin connector for the power motherboard power, this version requires its own power external adapter. This means that you will need a separate AC adapter in order to make this board work, and it should be noted that this board does not come with the adapter. Both the NC94 and the NC96 boards contain 4 SATA plug and 2 DDR2 memory slots as well as mini-PCI slots that can be used for WiFi cards.

Testing

The following benchmarks were used in conjunction with the NC96-510-LF:

Ram	Kingston 2 GB – 800MHz
Case	InWin Diva
HDD	Seagate 160 GB, 5400 RPM
OS	Windows 7 Professional

Videos and programs used in testing:

• Hot Tub Time Machine Trailer (1080p/720p) @ 60 fps Max
• PCMark Vantage
• Sisoft Sandra

Video Playback

720p HD Playback

The playback for the full 720p content did not exhibit any discontinuities or audio lag. The average frame rate throughout the test sample was 59.8 fps while the min and the max were 50 and 63 fps respectively.

For further testing, I skipped around the track to find out the turn around time for a random seek. This can be evidenced in the random drop of the frame rates in pictures below. The average seek time for this function was 40.9 fps.

1080p HD Playback

Unfortunately full HD playback did not experience frame rates as great as the 720p demo. The average for the full HD playback is 49 fps. The minimum and maximum values were 13 and 64 fps relatively.

The performance further degraded when I tried to skip throughout the sample video down to an average of 21 frames per second. Visually, I encountered significant video playback delays as well as stutters during each skip.

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PCMark Vantage

PCMark was generally designed to compare and contrast different system based on a similar benchmark. In that sense, comparing the performance of this board is almost essential to the performance of the ION TOP PC that we reviewed a while back. The only differences between the two setups was the hard drive which is reflected in the HDD score of 10K points for the ION-TOP vs 2K points in the NC96-510-LF. Overall, however, the difference in scores was a mere 200 point differences, meaning that a NC96 with an Intel based graphics system, will deliver similar performance to the ION-TOP, an nVidia graphics based system.

NC96-510-LF	ION TOP

SiSoft Sandra – Arithmentic

The processors in both the ION-TOP and the NC96 are one in the same, therefore there was little to no difference in the performance. Both processors (Intel Atom 330 1.66 GHz, Multi-threaded) appeared to the benchmarking software as 3.4~3.3 cores and delivered exact same results. Both systems performed better than their Atom Single core predecessors, but still did not have the push to score better than their Intel Core 2 Duo ULV (Ultra Low Voltage) counterparts.

NC96-510-LF	ION TOP

Sisoft Sandra – MultiCore Efficiency

There have been significant improvements in the performance of the Atom 330. The ION-TOP produced an Inter-Core bandwidth of 3.91 GB/s with a latency of 24s. The NC96, on the other hand, produced a 4.95 GB/s inter core bandwidth with a 23 ns (a 26% increase in performance). These scores placed the NC96 in the third place, losing out to the E6700 and the Phenom 2 – 945 both of which are full fledged desktop processors.

NC96-510-LF	ION TOP

Sisoft Sandra – Multi-Media

The multimedia benchmark reaffirmed the TV and Movies Results we obtained from the from PCMark. Similarly to the PCMark results, the Muti-media results for Sisoft Sandra show 18.19 MPixels/s in Aggregate Multimedia performance for both systems. This places the systems in the third place, losing to AMDs Athlon’s 4000 and 4400 mobile processors.

NC96-510-LF	ION TOP

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Conclusion

After all said and done the question ultimately comes down to a single decision, is this the right board for me? While that question can be answered only by none other than yourself , the NC96-510-LF should definitely make it into the list of your considerations. Priced at approximately $120 the board remains relatively cheap when compared to its competitors. When the hard drive, the RAM and the case are added, one could have a system priced at a moderate $200-$250. The price point and will mostly depend on the amount of storage rather than on actual hardware as even the bare minimum of 2 GB of RAM will still be enough to flawlessly render 720p content and average watchable framerates at 1080p.