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

Pros: Snappy when an SSD is used. Has HDMI and VGA out.

Cons: Only has one USB 2.0 header and no USB 3.0 header. Uses SO-DIMM's

Overall Review: A good value.

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: 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: Energy efficient
price
power

Cons: Only 2 SATA ports with 3 GB/s speeds

Overall Review: I use this board/cpu for a home server that runs dedicated games, media (plex), and a file server.

Able to handle all with ease.

I even run an ARK dedicated server on this!

Pros: On paper this looked to be a great match for a project server based on CentOS Linux. When tested with non-CentOS operating systems, it appeared to be what we had hoped it would be with CentOS.

Cons: Could never get it to fully install CentOS. USB failed. Tried with PS/2 keyboard and mouse and SATA DVD - failed. Tried again with USB turned off in UEFI per some user forum posts, but it would fail every time.

Overall Review: It did work with Linux Mint Debian Edition and Windows, but our project required we use CentOS or Red Hat - so this was not the right motherboard for this project.

Posting this review to warn any other potential CentOS / Red Hat users that they should look elsewhere. This motherboard will not work for them.

Pros: -Small
-Draws almost no power
-Speedy for what it is
-DB9 on board with a second via header

Cons: Only one USB header on board (Missed that when I needed two)

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: Parallel port.
Fanless.
Low power consumption

Cons: USB works right up until the time I load Linux. Then the mouse light goes out and stays out.

This motherboard must work okay with WIndows but there seem to be a lot of complaints about its compatibility with LInux. I couldn't get any USB devices to work with either Debian (LinuxCNC) or Ubuntu. Updating the BIOS to 1.60 didn't help.

Overall Review: I bought this motherboard to act as a CNC controller. Key capabilities were fanless operation and a parallel port. The inability to get USB to work means I can't use USB wireless to control it.