Jetway HA12-LF

Floating in a sea of boards…

As we near CES we see the final boards manufactures release prior to the big name companies changing the game once again, In order to survive the pre-CES rush a manufacture needs to release a product that stands above the rest. Jetway aims to stand above the rest by releasing the Hummer HA12-LF which is a ATX standard AMD AM3 board sporting the 890GX + SB850 chipset and packing both USB3 and SATA6Gbps connections for all your speedy peripherals. The big question is; is this board a bang or will it end up being a bust just in time for CES 2011, join me as I show you just what this board can do.

The slick HA12-LF

Testing the board will take place on a standard rig and will include overclocking as well as stability testing.

Specifications

CPU	Supports AMD Socket AM3 AMD Athlon I & II and Phenom I & II
Chipset	AMD 890GX Chipset + AMD SB850 Chipset
Hyper Transport Bus	HT 3.0
Memory	Dual Channel DDR3 memory technology 4X 240-pin DDR3 DIMM slots Supports DDR3 1333/1066(OC 1600) non-ECC ,un-buffered memory Max 16GB
Expansion slots	2x 32-bit PCI slots 2x PCI Express 2.0 x16 slots by 8-LANE 1x PCI Express x1 slot 1x Mini PCI Express slot (PCI-E x1 slot and MINI PCI-E slot cannot be used at the same time)
Storage	AMD™SB850 Southbridge Chipset : 6x Serial ATA3 6Gb/s connectors Supports HDDs with RAID 0, 1,5,10,JBOD functions 1x Ultra DMA 133 IDE connector
Audio	Realtek ALC883 HD Audio with 8-Channels
Ethernet LAN	Realtek RTL 8111DL PCI express Gigabit LAN
USB	Embedded 10x USB2.0 & 2x USB 3.0
Special Features	Advanced power design that supports the latest Scoket-AM3 K10 CPU’s Support ACPI S3 & G.P.I Technlogy & Core enchancer 3D audio Function and Debug port Integrated DDR3 128mb sideport memory
Rear I/O	2x USB3.0 4x USB 2.0 1x PS/2 KB/MS port 1x VGA/ 1x DVI , 1x HDMI 1x RJ45 1x Optical out Audio I/O ports
Internal I/O	3 USB 2.0 headers CPU / Chassis fan connectors 1x 8pin ATX 12v connector 1x 24 Pin ATX power connector 1x COM headers 1x audio headers
BIOS	16mb SMTx1 Flash Rom
Form Factor	ATX form factor ( 230mm x 305mm )  ( 9in x 12in)

A brief overview:

The front of the packaging shows basic informational stickers on the components included.

The HA-12LF comes in packaging similar to other Jetway hummer series boards.

Overall the packaging is very similar to that of other hummer series boards which adds a nice uniformity to Jetway’s product line. Overall presentation is done very well without to much flash needed to convey the product.

A closer look at the sticker shown on the bottom of the packaging, this sticker details some of the specs.

Opening the packaging reveals the board wrapped in anti-static bag and held in place with foam. On top of the board lies the cd, manual and back plate.

In addition to the board you get SATA cables, driver CD, back plate, manual,

PATA cable, 4pin molex to SATA cable.

while the SATA cables don’t say SATA 3 much like other cables we have seen in the past these are still usable with SATA 6Gbps with minuscule difference.

The board is laid out in a nice pattern of blacks, grays, and blue which is far better on the eyes then some of the other garnish colors some manufactures use.

3D audio button, press this prior to booting for “enhanced 3D effect on earphone audio output. In practice this effect provides a negligible difference in sound quality. This may be better when used with a full 3D setup.

A shot of the 4 Dimm slots providing a maximum size of 16gb of DDR3 Ram. Channel 1 is on the inside (blue) and channel 2 is on the outside. The board doesn’t care if you use channel 1 or channel 2 for booting unlike some boards which require you to use channel 1.

Th rear I/O panel, as you can see with the inclusion of both DVI and HDMI this board would make a great media center board. USB3.0 is labeled with a sticker and the connectors being blue, all remaining USB ports are 2.0.

Left Hand side is the debug LED which comes in handy when your system is throwing fits and you are trying to figure out whats happening, the LED codes are in the back of the manual and a pretty detailed. There is both an on-board power button as well as a reset button which is becoming increasingly common thankfully. The USB headers are aligned with the bottom of the board for ease of placement.

On the top right lies the 8pin 12v ATX power connector its hidden right behind the stylistic heat sinks surrounding the socket. In practice this placement is a bit of a pain for most cases especially if you have a large heat sink it can be difficult to get this connector in. While not a deal breaker its a minor annoyance. This board can comfortably fit huge graphics cards as long as your willing to give up a standard PCI slot on the bottom.

Test System

CPU	AMD Phenom II 970 @3.5Ghz
Heatsink	ThermalTake Frio
Motherboard	Jetway HA12-LF
Chipset	AMD 890GX + AMD SB850 Chipset
Graphics Card	Sparkle Nvidia GTX 480
RAM	Crucial Ballistix 1600 4Gb Kit
Sound	Onboard Audio
HHD 1	Western Digital Velociraptor 150 Gb
HHD 2	Seagate 2TB barracuda XT
Power Supply	Thortech Thunderbolt Plus 800w
Case	Antec Nine hundred
OS	Windows 7 Enterprise

The BIOS is a standard American Megatrends BIOS with all the normal bells and whistles.

Basic boot settings and some advanced CPU configuration but not overclocking under advanced settings, overclocking has its own header.

Overclocking is under the Power user overclock settings. Under the overclock settings you can change just about every value under the sun including overclocking your graphics card, down coring your processor or setting the individual timings on your ram should your ram support it.

While using the BIOS to overclock is certainly the power users way of squeezing more power out it is not by any means safe, you can damage or destroy your board and processor by monkeying around with settings you don’t understand. The HA12-LF has an overclocking utility which makes it very easy to overclock and while not completely safe its not nearly as dangerous as using the BIOS, if you are unfamiliar with what these values do but you want to overclock I would strongly recommend using the Hummer overclock utility. ( NOTE: Due to unforeseen circumstances the overclock utility was not available at press time for this board. )

I benchmarked the network performance of the Realtek RTL 8111DL  chipset to rate its read write transfer speed over a gigabit network.

LAN speed test

The network test showed fairly unsurprising results for a gigabit network card. Most gigabit network cards rarely put up a sustained 1000Mbps like they are supposed to most on-board NIC’s in the desktop market put out about 750Mbps which is what we saw with the Realtek RTL 8111DL. This test transferred a 100mb file to a server locally (within 10ft ) over Gigabit Ethernet.

HDTach – SATA III test

This test showed some surprising results, I originally ran this test using the very common Marvell 88SE9123 SATA controller which is used in a large number of SATA III devices including the Asus P7P55D Premium motherboard we reviewed this time last year. The Marvel Controller is in blue where the AMD SB850 chipset is in red. Notice how much more stable the read/write rates are, the average read time is also 3MB faster than the marvel controller. Both tests were done on the same Seagate Barracuda XT drive

AES Encryption

This benchmark takes advantage of the pathways between the CPU and RAM as both are heavily utilized. The benchmark itself is a test of the systems ability to handle cryptography.  Overall this build did very well for only being a quad core processor.

Zlib – Zip Archiving – Compression/ Decompression.

This benchmark measures combined CPU and memory performance through the public ZLib compression library. Similar to the AES encryption this system did very well for only having access to 4 CPU cores.

I avoided using benchmarks that rely heavily on GPU or other subsystems and instead focused on benchmarks that showed the actual performance of the main board, I feel this provides the most accurate results of what Jetway’s HA12-LF can do.

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Summary and Conclusion:

Overall throughout the course of this review I was constantly surprised by the HA12-LF from Jetway. I really did not expect to see such a strong board this close to CES when most manufactures hold onto their products waiting to catch the eye of the all the press at CES. There were a few rough spots that could use a little more polish such as the location of the 8 pin 12v connector on the top of the board which in practice is irritating with anything larger than stock coolers. I also would have liked to see full gigabit performance though I realize that full gig is rarely achieved in on-board ethernet. One other minor gripe would be I would like to see the ram slots about an inch farther back from the CPU socket so that over sized coolers would not interfere with the first two ram slots, though this seems to be a problem with most ATX motherboards. But these complaints are not nearly enough to keep me from giving the HA12-LF motherboard the approved hardware award for being a good board that handles SATA III much better than most of the competition as well as providing a very solid experience. The price at the time of this review is around $110 USD which is about average for the features this board provides.