Intel Pineview review and Jetway mini-ITX

Jetway NC96-410-LF

Manufacturer: Jetway

Jetway provided us with two of its latest Atom motherboards, the first of which is the NC96 with a single-core Atom D410 attached. You can buy the NC96 with a D510 dual-core Atom also, but the rest of the board remains the same.

The first thing you'll notice is that there's no ATX power connector – instead, this board features a small 12V power socket on the rear I/O that requires power from an external AC-DC power brick. We powered it from a generic 65W one without issue.

You'll also notice the Molex socket - it's not an alternative power source, as it’s actually for plugging in a power adapter for a hard drive (and optical drive). Unfortunately, Jetway does not include this adapter cable. A little foresight would have been nice!

Feature List:

• Intel Atom D410 (1.66GHz, single core, two thread)
  
• Two DDR2 memory slots supporting up to 4GB of DDR2-667/800MHz memory in single channel mode
  
• Two SATA 3Gbps ports from NM10
  
• Two SATA 3Gbps ports from JMicron JMB363
  
• Realtek ALC662 5.1 Channel Audio
  
• IDE port pin-out (requires adapter)
  
• PCI slot
  
• One mini PCI-Express x1 slot
  
• LVDS header/inverter and GPIO header
  
• 10/100 Fast Ethernet

Sadly the D410 CPU is fitted with possibly the loudest fan this side of Heathrow, as it positively deafened us in the labs. We understand that this is specifically an 'industrial board', but not everyone works with ear protectors. The two DDR2 DIMM slots allow for plenty of memory expansion, or simply the use of older DIMMs. Four SATA ports are a highlight, and rarity for an Atom motherboard too, and despite the fact they can't all be tied together to form one extensive RAID array, it does offer the potential of quite a nice, low power basic server.


The included LVDS header is an interesting addition for modders who want to reuse a laptop LCD screen, although you'll want another soundcard because the Realtek ALC662 codec is about as basic as it gets. Thankfully there's both a PCI slot and a mini PCI-Express slot for a notebook style add-in cards: WiFi cards to fit are just £20, but going more mobile and upmarket, even HSDPA cards are available for £120.


The NC96 rear I/O is about as basic as you could imagine. With parallel, serial and PS2 ports still raising their heads, just four USB 2.0 ports (there's another six via pin-outs), one RJ45 Ethernet socket, the D-Sub video output and three 3.5mm audio jacks. The serial and parallel ports are forgivable if Jetway is intending this board for industrial use (where serial and parallel devices are still present) but the limited amount of USB ports might hinder more extravagant uses.