Jetway Kuroshio BI-600 Intel X58

Analysis and Conclusion

Jetway may not be a popular company in the USA yet but today they brought a good and very solid budget Intel X58 based motherboard. Jetway BI-600 provides an array of nice features for a budget board. For the price you will not find this many features of it’s kind. Inclusion of things like 2x PCI-e x16 and x8 lanes, Dual Gigabit LAN, and even Port 80 diagnostic or CMOS clear all increase the price of the motherboard. In this case it, surprisingly, did not increase it a lot because it is available at a very affordable price.

On the bad side the BIOS wasn’t very versatile in overclocking options for those of you who like to squeeze every little bit out of your system. This is not necessary for budget builders or even for enthusiasts. Simple overclocking  is can be enough considering that you can easily achieve stable 3.6GHz on i7 920, perhaps push it to 4.0GHz but sacrificing the safety of stability. The layout of the motherboard could use some work. Some things can be improved, some should be changed.

The performance of Jetway’s take on Intel’s X58 is actually very stable and doesn’t seem to produce a lot of heat. Though benchmarks are just for giving a general understanding I think it clearly shows that this motherboard is not behind any other system in terms of stock performance. Granted, if you’re planning on buying memory that is above DDR3 1600 the performance might take a hit. Rather, not take any hit at all because the system would not be able to support it or even overclock the memory past 1600MHz due to lack of Uncore voltage regulator.

Taking all things under consideration Jetway BI-600 is very respectable motherboard providing many features that you will not see on other budget boards. It requires less power without performance drop thus also not producing a lot of heat. I can recommend this board to budget builders who are not planning on squeezing and pushing your system to the edge with overclocking.

Update 04/04/2010

Unfortunately it’s one of those things that you cannot test right away. That is reliability. Even though this board seemingly performed well in many important areas, reliability wasn’t one of them.

Note: I am knowledgeable user and caution to the point of paranoid who knows to be aware of static when touching hardware. My computer is also plugged into a surge protector. On top of that one of the more reliable and stable PSU’s out there.

After a month and a half problems started to appear out of thin air and very few hours of use(double digits). First, one of the SATA controllers gone rogue. It stopped detective the presence of the HDD. That left me 5 out of 6, not that it’s a big problem, but that raised my caution. Week or so later while doing stability testing for overclocking Prime95 starter faulting at very low overclock speeds. Next day, RAM Slot 1 was not being recognized. This motherboard will never be able to use triple channel RAM again. This warrants an update on reliability issue and a removal of “Approved Hardware” from TechwareLabs.