Question 1

Is the ethernet port gigabit speed?  No mention of the NIC at all on the site.

Accepted Answer

yes it is Gigabit and it saturates about 115 meg/s
i've transfered large 20GB+ files beetween 2 networked machnies in few minutes 
sustained speeds above 80meg/s

Question 2

If you use the power brick option to power this board, how do you supply power to the hard drive?

Accepted Answer

There are two special connectors on the motherboard for drive power, and two special power cables are included in the box. If you are going to have an optical drive in your build, you will be limited to one hard drive or SSD because there is no way to power more than two drives. [But you could use an external USB optical drive and use the two power connectors for HDDs and/or SSDs.]

Question 3

Will this board work with Win 10? Anyone try it yet?

Accepted Answer

It'll work with 7,8,8.1 and most certainly with 10

i tried 10 worked flawlessly 
But no wmc and i went back to 7 as may computer main role is pvr and i didn't like next pvr experience so went back to w7.

It sips energy at very low levels just don't expect to max put your ssd if you are using such technology

my ssd runs at full speed (550mb) but about half the possible iops as I don't think the sata controller being tuned for energy sipping is capable to achieve 95k of advertized iops.

But in my case for the main purpose of pvr and occasional browse it's awesome

Question 4

Anyone using this with Antec Mini-ITX Case ISK110-VESA ?

The ISK110-VESA comes with a Delta Electronic AC adapter (90 Watts).  I cannot get any good details with that adapter on if that is compatible with this motherboard or not.

Have anyone tried this yet?  Or do I still have to search for and purchase a separate AC adapter?

Accepted Answer

The power supply board from the case you mentioned would be useless as the 1900dc supplies its own power from the jack to every peripheral including odd and hdd/sdd get the antec psu out of the case as you will not use it. 1900dc doesn't even have the atx header.
The transformer required is 12-19.5 volt amperage varies  
I have odd, ssd and hdd and never seen wattage above 29watts average was 16-20 - 1 while sleeping.

90 watts 12 or 19 is overkill.

Enjoy your board its awesome my htpc has been running on it over a year under ssd and 2tb with blurayD without any hiccups

Question 5

Can the CPU be swapped out?

Accepted Answer

No, Atom chips are sold in trays to OEMs and soldered down, so it’s not practical to purchase individual CPUs or to upgrade them. Happily, this is currently one of the best Atom chips. Honestly, if you need more CPU horsepower, you’re not looking for an Atom.

Question 6

What is the maximum amount of memory allowed?

Accepted Answer

J1900 (and J2900) support the maximum of 8GB, regardless of  dual or single channel configuration (check Intel site for specs).
So in this mobo, you can put either one 8GB or two 4GB SO-DIMMs. I used mine with Crucial Ballistix 1600GHz 8GB DDR3L (low voltage), with 9-9-9-24 timing. The mobo downclocked it to 1333GHz without any issues (which actually improved the timing) - automatically. Good stuff.

Question 7

In BIOS is there a 'wake up on keypress' option? If i use this as HTPC, i wouldnt want to reach for power button everytime. I wouldnt want to leave it on all the time as well. So any option to remotely powering it on?

Accepted Answer

There is one wake setting for USB Keyboard/Remote and another for USB Mouse. Either can be used to wake the system from the S5 state. I think that’s what you’re looking for.

Question 8

I read the asrock manual about power supplies. Which have been found to work, and with what kind of ram/hd setups?

Accepted Answer

So far I've used two old IBM thinkpad bricks:  16V x 3.36A (50W), and 16V x 4.5A (72W)
System has 2 x 4 GB PC1333 memory, 2 x 2 TB Seagate NAS disks, 1 x 128 GB SSD
Works with either power supply.  Haven't done a DC current measurement yet.

Question 9

Can I use the SATA power connectors to power other things, for example, a 1394 Firewire card installed in the 1X PCIe slot?  Or are these exclusively for SDD/HDD?

Accepted Answer

Obviously, not having such a card I can't say with certainty.  However, the board comes with SATA power connectors, each designed to drive two hard drives. So if your card accepts SATA power connectors or you have an adapter, then it probably will. Keep in mind that the power connectors were designed to drive hard drives so don't expect a lot of power. Interpolating from the manual, I think they figure a HDD should use about 15W, so figure 30W per connector.

Question 10

So I want to build a small unraid server in a Lian Li Q25B case. I bought a PCIe x1 sata adapter that would add 4 more sata ports to this board. Would that work? would I be able to power 6 HDDs and an SSD with just a laptop power supply?

Accepted Answer

It probably would depend on your power supply. However, if your HDD's are 3.5" then I would have serious doubts that it would work. As far as I know these hard drives consume considerable power especially during startup. And: with 6 HDD's you most certainly would need fans for cooling the hard drives especially in a server. And the point of this motherboard is that it is fanless (but it has 2 fan connectors).

Questions & Answers