ASRock Q1900B-ITX Intel Celeron J1900 2.0GHz Mini ITX Motherboard / CPU / VGA Combo

Pros: Performance Layout Value Connectivity (modern and legacy in one: HDMI, USB3, Parallel, Serial) Gigabit Ethernet

Cons: Memory documentation not clear Memory socket flimsy (broke due to swapping memory a lot at first due to first con)

Overall Review: This is a great little board. I purchased one for my father to replace an aging laptop turned desktop. This little board has done an excellent job paired with an ssd for his web/office needs. It is running fan less and has been fine. I tried raspberri pi2 and banana pro to make low power servers but neither could handle the network throughput I needed. The pi has 10/100 and the banana's cpu couldn't handle samba and 1000. I reviewed hundreds of mini-itx boards and in the end settled back on the one I picked up for my father. I landed with this board and a seagate nas 3tb drive with 4gb memory. The system consumes about 22watts idle with the disk spinning. The power supply consumed about 10 by itself. I never pushed it over 30 in my tests under load. It has been running debian as a home server for 3 months without pause. I reliably max out the gigabit port in my desktop when transferring files via samba shares to it. The CPU has plenty left over to do other things at the same time. I wanted low power with virtualization capabilites so that I could run KVM or other hypervisors. I needed usb3 to use for backing up to external usb3 drive. As I mentioned the one major con is the documentation was poorly written on the memory specs. It lists: DDR3 1333/1066 which I assumed meant you could use 1333 or 1066 memory. What it means is 1333 (PC3 10660). 1066 does NOT work. 1333 (PC3 10660) works perfectly. As I was troubleshooting if I received bad memory etc., I over used the memory socket and broke one of the eject tabs. The hold down part still works but when you open the clamp, you have to pull the chip up on that side. I concluded I could live with that and kept the board. I plan to install KVM soon and start running small VM's for various abstraction, testing and sandboxing. I have seen others mention difficulty with headless and or linux. I have had 0 trouble with headless or debian. I can't say for other distros. I also have only used usb keyboard/mice so perhaps ps2 has a problem.

Pros: Works great with Linux (Zorin), very fast for the price and nice video. Paired with the Antec ISK 300-150 case, it is nearly silent when you change the fan settings in the BIOS.

Cons: Very picky about memory, will not work with theG.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) 204-Pin DDR3 SO-DIMM DDR3 1066 (PC3 8500) I bought with the board. No USB 3 header on the board and only two SATA ports.

Pros: Good CPU perf for price, overall went into Win 7 Pro setup seamlessly. With SSD drive it is quite capable box. The only weakness is the graphics aren't uber fast.

Cons: Graphics not super fast, but not horrible either.

Overall Review: NOTE: I had to use 1333 DIMMs on this. The page, ASRock, nearly everyone seems to say 1333/1066 but 1066 would not boot for me. Per Intel it looks like the J1900 CPU wants 1333. Once I switched it went smooth.

Pros: * Extremely low power consumption, 10W TDP * Coupled with a fanless case and PSU, the entire PC would make no noise. * Fast and capable of most HTPC duties. I managed to serve 4 WMC Extenders while watching a 5th TV channel on the PC without slow down. * Intel Quick Sync Video works wonders for video encoding. Using Handbrake Nightly built (supports QSV), It can encode an full bitrate BD rip into 1080p video at 90 fps. * Cheap

Cons: Not as fast as Core i3.

Pros: Played some 1080 hd videos from Youtube with out any problem. Used Team 4GB (2 x 2GB) 204-Pin DDR3 SO-DIMM DDR3 1333 Laptop Memory Model TSD34096M1333C9DC-E. Runs Fine.

Cons: When running the video the cpu tempature increased to 76 degrees centigrade. I plan to install a fan on the heat sync.

Pros: Runs XenServer 6.5 out of the box, and can run 2 or 3 server vms with no problems. Very fast for a Celeron. No complaints at all!

Cons: None.

Pros: For the money, this is a nice little board for a system that you need for basic tasks. I run win7 32 bit on this system no problem. I will be using this pc for CNC control via the parallel port. Youtube and netflix also work fine with the onboard video.

Cons: Still pretty slow in the end...

Pros: This J1900 SoC is fast and efficient. It maxes out at about 10 single-precision GFLOPs due to its lack of newer SIMD instruction set extensions, but for the TDP and price, it can't be beat. Amazingly, the chip tops out at 60° C under full load, and draws about 23.5 W at the outlet with a 2.5" HDD. It also seems to turbo clock 500 MHz higher (2.90 GHz instead of 2.40 GHz) when running Linux, as opposed to Windows. In my floating point benchmark, this seems to yield a 20-25% performance improvement. It also seems to stay at its maximum turbo clock whenever it's under load. The SoC has that much thermal headroom.

Cons: There's only two SATA ports, and they're 3 Gb/s. Something to think about if you're running an SSD, or want to install more than two drives. The memory performance is pretty abysmal by today's standards, but for a home and office machine, you won't notice. There's no onboard DVI port, so if you want to use a digital output, you have to get an adapter from HDMI to DVI. The PCI-E slot is closed end, so if you want to run a full length card, you need to get a riser. The integrated GPU leaves something to be desired, though it does play everything from 1080p to 4k just fine. The chip should play Civ V on low to medium settings, but anything more intensive is a no go. A nice feature the iGPU has (being based on Ivy Bridge graphics) is OpenCL support, though the performance wasn't anything to write home about.

Overall Review: This is a great board if you're looking to build a low cost home or office machine, a Linux desktop, or a web appliance like a firewall or proxy server. If you need a workstation, or something for gaming, look elsewhere.