ASRock Q1900DC-ITX Intel Celeron J1900 Motherboard / CPU / VGA Combo

Pros: Fast low wattage motherboard, everything worked first time. Stable as a rock.

Please see other thoughts for update

Cons: Noda

Overall Review: After i rote my first review i tested this motherboard with a 12v power supply. Acuity 4 different 12v power supplies . What i found was both boards us the same amount of power with a 12v power supply. The 19v power supply uses less watts yet more amps so in the end it works out the same. Using this board with built on power saves room though still uses the same wattage as the ASRock Q1900-ITX . So the max with a 120fan and 3 laptop drives Amd 16gigs of memory , the max power though just for a split second is 27.6w at 12v for both motherboards , average 19w with idle as low as 11w

Also i had used the windows installs from the ASRock Q1900-ITX hard drive. I assumed since there almost identical boards i could just take the SSD out of the ASRock Q1900-ITX and use it in this board. That was incorrect and after my first review i was getting window errors and i did fresh installs of windows 7 and windows 8.1 and found virus scans to use half of what i reported last time in my first review , depending on the program. Yet non of them i tested 8 in all went passed 50% , most stayed closer to 20%-35% very impressive


windows ie score did not improve , the overall system was faster with fresh installs and everything works

Pros: In summary: Basically the best 24-7 HTPC / home server board currently available. Best balance of energy consumption, practical computing power, and initial cost of any board I've seen.

I bought this board/CPU for use as a low-power 24-7 home server and HTPC, and, for those purposes, it's nearly perfect. In general, the integrated graphics processor is fast and snappy, and the system feels just as responsive as it would with any modern i3, i5, or i7. Ubuntu Gnome 14.04 runs nearly flawlessly; the Gnome UI feels smoother and more responsive on this system than it does on my laptop which has an Intel i3-2350M with the HD 3000 IGP. All video playback is flawless, including high-bitrate 1080p h264, even while the system is under load. XBMC runs perfectly with no issues using the default Confluence skin. SNES, NES, and N64 emulators all run perfectly at full speed.

I chose this ASRock board because it is the only J1900 board with DC input and an on-board power regulator. With DC input, the system uses very little energy--significantly less than the non-DC versions of this board, with which quite a few watts of electricity are lost to inefficiency. For my power supply, I'm using a 90W Fujitsu CP360065-02 which was about $10 shipped. This 90W power supply is more than enough to power my system, which includes one SSD, three 3.5" WD Red mechanical drives, a bluetooth dongle, and an IR receiver.

Other pros:
- Uses less electricity on average than a single energy-saving lightbulb
- ASRock's UEFI offers a great fan speed control option which helps to make the system very quiet.
- The UEFI Internet update feature is nice, although it required a few tries before it actually worked.

Cons: The single biggest issue I've had with this board is that when the hardware configuration is changed in some way, e.g. a new USB bluetooth dongle is plugged in, the system occasionally hangs after a warm reboot (via the reboot command) before reaching the grub bootloader. Strangely enough, this also sometimes happens if the partition configuration of any of the connected drives is changed, even if the boot partition is not touched. This is extremely inconvenient when it occurs because it requires physically rebooting the system with the power button, which is a major problem if you're using the system as a remote server. I don't know if this is technically a software issue with Ubuntu and its current Linux kernel (12 September 2014) or not, and it may be fixable with a BIOS/UEFI update, but this does not happen on any of my other motherboards. This issue does not occur from a cold boot (that is, fully shutting down and then turning the system on again), although that is useless for the purposes of remote administration. My theoretical solution for Ubuntu 14.04 is to add the kernel parameter reboot=p to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT (GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash reboot=p") in /etc/default/grub and then run update-grub2 as root. (I'm not yet sure if this works, but I haven't had the issue since implementing the fix.) Although this may just be a Linux issue, it doesn't happen with any of my other systems, so I took an egg off for it.

Other cons:
- included UEFI is a user interface disaster. Some menus are very unintuitive.
- "Intel USB3.0 Mode", when enabled, seems to interfere with some IR receivers. Disabling this sometimes helps.
- VGA port is scarily flimsy due to the way it's attached to the board; I feel like I could easily break it with my fingers. Wish it were reinforced somehow. DC port also seems fragile, would be nice if it were reinforced. Not a big deal if you keep this on a shelf in a media center, but if you have kids or pets or some other real-world household nuisance, flimsy ports are a disaster waiting to happen.

Overall Review: - Ubuntu's live CD and the freshly-installed system both ran terribly, which worried me at first. After updating and rebooting the installed system, everything ran just fine.
- UEFI Internet update option failed multiple times before finally working
- Didn't include an internal speaker or "buzzer", although that sometimes comes with your case. I had to use a buzzer I had left over from an old PC.
- As of September 12, 2014, I occasionally receive a kernel panic in Ubuntu 14.04 when unplugging and replugging my USB IR receiver (included with Rosewill RHRC 11001 remote) while lircd is active. This is probably a software issue with Ubuntu but I haven't had time to test it.
- J1900 CPU is obviously more sensitive to resource-intensive tasks than beefier chips, although it's many times better than something like the Raspberry Pi or similarly underpowered embedded systems. e.g. When running Nautilus in the background during my first boot, Totem video thumbnail generator caused the system to stutter and thrash intermittently while trying to generate a thumbnail for a corrupt video file--a real-world example of when having a faster CPU would have made a big difference.
- The first SATA 3 port is seen by the operating system as the second of the four SATA ports on the board, which means that most Linux distros assign the first SATA 3 port the device map of /dev/sdb. The problem with this is that some installers are too stupid to install the bootloader to /dev/sdb by default, even when the root partition is on /dev/sdb, which means that some users might have issues if they don't keep this in mind during during the installation.
- If you're using the Rosewill Legacy v6 case, you'll need a 15-pin SATA power extension cable to attach one of the top drives to the SATA power header on the motherboard. $5 or less.
- Probably far too slow for 4k video, and no hardware decoding of 4k video with Bay Trail as far as I'm aware (unlike some of the higher-end Celeron-branded Ivy Bridge / Haswell processors). I plan to relegate this to server-only duty once 4k really catches on, although I don't think that will be for many years to come.
- You can probably configure another system to have similarly low power draw through undervolting and clever configuration, but this is a great out-of-the-box solution for the typical HTPC/home server use case.