Question 1

What is the minimum PSU requirement for this motherboard, useing and SSD, and 1.35v memory?

Accepted Answer

That is a good question.  I used a 1U case that already had a PSU installed.  The Gigabyte website was missing the power supply requirement for this motherboard.  I was able to use my 20 pin PSU, so there is not much power useage.  I don't have a wattmeter and never checked the online power draw.  I installed the Gigabyte recommended memory and a PNY SSD.  I had issues with the sound chip driver on FreeBSD and put everything back on the shelf until another project not requiring sound or X comes along.

Question 2

Does this board include a watchdog timer?  I'm considering using this for a router/firewall build and would like the machine to automatically reboot if it becomes unresponsive for some reason.

Accepted Answer

No! Watchdog features are NOT included as an adjunct to the AMI BIOS, and there is no provision for Watchdog functionality shipped with this motherboard.

If you intend to use this motherboard strictly as a firewall it will perform well, however the integrated NIC's use Reatec  RTL-8111 controllers and as such rely a great deal on the CPU to handle throughput especially if you employ additional functions like Intrusion Detection, Content Filtering, Virus Detection, and the like.

I have been using this Motherboard with pfSense 2.1 with good results. A word of caution during installation of pfSense, set CPU Cores to 1 in the BIOS then after the install you can reset the CPU Cores to All.  BIOS settings being set correctly are imperative to a successful install with pfSense on this MB.

Question 3

how many SATA ports does this have?  the specifications don't say how many.  in my search for a Mini-ITX m/b I had found at least one other that that also didn't have the number of SATA listed.  In my case I am looking for a min-ITX m/b that supports 6 SATA ports for a FreeNAS or NAS4Free file server.  I wish there was a way to power search for such things.  it's painful to manually look at every mini-ITX m/b individually.

Accepted Answer

This board does not have more than 2 ports and they are not the newest higher speed ports. With the legacy ports (serial and parallel) on board they gave up the room for sata. My embedded project needed those legacy ports so it was a good choice for me. Not for NAS box

Question 4

Does the board take 1.35V or 1.5V RAM?

Accepted Answer

Hi Sidney;

To answer your question, this board uses 1.35 Volt memory, up to 8GB.

I have the G.Skill F3-1333C9D-8GSL 8GB (2x4GB) memory installed in my Gigabyte GA-J1900N-D3V motherboard. Works Great and is also available from Newegg.

I am using this board a dedicated Firewall/Gateway with pfSense as the operating system. It is available as a free download and is a specialized version of FreeBSD.

Good luck with your system build... Dave J. H.

Question 5

Does this motherboard support 1.5v SODIMMs? According to the Gigabyte site, "Support for DDR3/-L SO-DIMM" is listed. I have a hard time finding 1.35v memory here in our country, but 1.5v is aplenty.

Accepted Answer

the manual that comes with the board says 1.35v dimms are needed also i would not buy this board unless your going to run windows os because it has issues running linux as i purchased the board to run pfsense firewall and it has problems with the acpi version.

Question 6

How tall is this board?  Specifically will it fit in a 1U rack mount case?

Accepted Answer

It fits very well in a 1U case.  The board uses laptop memory that lies flat.

Question 7

Does anyone knows how to flash the F2 BIOS for this system board???

Gigabyte offers three options, a DOS based download which does just says !!! SPI Flash initiate failure !!! when running it from a bootable DOS flash drive. @BIOS which is supposed to support Windows 7 64bit (which one can't install without flashing the F2 BIOS), Windows 8 and 8.1 both 32bit and 64bit but it requires the App Center (& .NET 4 which is already in Windows 8) but the App Center fails to install with the Error Number: 0x80040707, DLL function call crashed: CheckFK.SearchBIOSStr. So when trying to do anything with @BIOS, one just nothing, no messages, nothing. Also, Gigabyte provide Q-Flash which is a BIOS based flash, one is supposed to press END during the POST or F8 when it the BIOS but neither do anything either???

Accepted Answer

1. Install Windows 8 trial.
2. Install Gigabyte utility app (@Bios)
3. Manually download the F2 bios file from Gigabyte servers.
4. Unzip downloaded .zip bios file.
5. Put all unzipped files into main folder of Gigabyte utility; C:/ProgramFilesx86/Gigabyte/...
6. Start @ BIOS application.
7. Browse to main folder, see #5 above for path.
8. Flash the motherboard with bios F2 version.
9. Install normal windows OS

Questions & Answers