Jetway NF96FL-510-LF Mini-ITX Motherboard

A Closer Look
The first thing that you will notice about this board is that most of it is taken up by the huge passive cooling design which covers over the Atom D510 processor and ICH8M chipset, both from Intel. The cooler is made from solid aluminium and follows a standard fin design that we’ve seen before. The heatsink is screwed down with spring clips so that the heatsink can be easily removed. 4 of the screw type spring fixtures attach to a X-type clamp bracket on the underneath of the board.

This board comes with a choice of 2 processors from the Intel Atom family, the first being the D510 with a clock speed of 1.66GHz or the slightly faster D525 processor, clocked at 1.8GHz of which both use a 667MHz front side bus. Both processors are dual core 64-bit processors with 4 threads in total (2 per core) with 1MB of L2 cache. They are both processed on a 45nm technology and share a TDP of 13watts each. The voltage range is very low, hence the cool 13watt TDP by using a range of 0.800V to 1.175V to give enough power needed, whilst keeping heat generation to a minimum.

We can also see that the board has two yellow memory slots of which the board and the Atom processor (due to its memory controller) allow up to 4GB of DDR2 667/800 to be used in a single channel configuration. For its uses, you will find that 4GB should be enough for the tasks that this board is capable of (gaming server, HTPC, media centre etc…) and shouldn’t need any more than the specified amount of memory. It is also worth noting that other, similar boards on the market do support DDR3 as opposed to DDR2, giving better bandwidth over the older modules. You will also find that price wise; you may be surprised as to how much difference there is between both sets of memory.

For a board like this, with its primary usage aimed at the HTPC/media centre market, you would expect a plethora of connections, and this board is no different with plenty of headers for jumpers, parallel ports and even a fan header for users wanting to modify this board into having an active cooling solution, though it is not needed but may be wanted for peace of mind. The majority of the jumpers on this board are for toggling the power function selections for the mini PCI-Express connector, USB etc…

Users wanting to build a system from this board are going to want the quietest components to match its passive design, and when it comes to storage, you can’t get much quieter than SSD’s. Jetway supply this board with 2 SATA II 3Gb/s ports and relevant cables to get you going, and due to this board having no IDE connectors, you will need to make sure that you have the relevant drives to match. Sadly, you are limited with only 2 on board SATA ports and an eSATA port on the rear, but for its uses, most consumers won’t bother with an optical drive once it’s all networked up.

One thing that this board has got that a lot of older boards don’t have is the mini PCI-Express connector that currently isn’t 100% mainstream but this will enable the board to do so much more than you may think it can currently do. With this connector, it will allow you to plug the likes of a wireless network adapter in, but personally we think that is old hat, whereas the most exciting component that could be added into this slot would be a mini PCI-Express SSD from the likes of someone like OCZ of which a typical 32GB version would cost around £75 giving speeds of around 110MBps. This in turn will also free up the 2 SATA ports for the inclusion of two huge storage drives, such as a set of Western Digital Caviar Green 3TB’s in a nice RAID 0 configuration setup. Only problem with that is the board not accepting RAID sadly, but you could still install 2 of these typical drives in a standard installation setting.

Most reviewers would probably stop writing now, knowing that a board like this (which would be perfect as a home storage centre or server) doesn’t even have the simple functions that we expect, such as RAID, but it does have something else. Whether this was Jetway’s intended plan or just a lucky coincidence that we noticed it for them but the board does have a legacy PCI slot of which a simple 4 port PCI SATA RAID controller card could be bought for around £30 from the likes of StarTech to give you that flexibility and functionality that you need. Sadly by using the PCI slot for the likes of a RAID controller card, you won’t be able to install the TV card that you was expecting, but a lot of the big players on the market have USB equivalents and with 5 USB ports on the rear and 2 USB headers on board, you won’t have a problem with finding the suitable connection for it.

Just next to the legacy PCI slot is where you will find an array of what can only be described as 2 rows of pins of which the novice user may mistake for headers or a place for jumper connections. It’s actually designed for a daughterboard or daughtercard, which are normally found on servers or older systems needing riser cards due to their chassis design. These are now becoming more frequent on products like this as they hit the mainstream market and become more popular. Daughterboards give the user the ability to add an expansion board of which there are many different types including RAID, Bluetooth, Ethernet and SATA to name but a few. These boards, due to their design and placement will normally sit upright or sometimes parallel to the motherboard in some cases, but either way, gives the board the functionality to extend its features, giving you many more uses to what you originally expected.

There is also another fan connector, but this time for a system fan if your chosen case permits it with a 3 pin header, so sadly no PWM control but you shouldn’t need it in your quest for quiet components to match the boards passive cooling. Some of the front panel connectors are nicely colour coded whilst others are just black, which we are a bit unsure as to why only half were made easier to connect with colour coding. Between all of this is a 4 pin Molex power connector for the included SATA cable to plug into to give power to any SATA devices you may have because this board doesn’t support a conventional power supply, but instead has a 12V DC input on the rear panel.

The rear I/O panel of the board is what will appeal to the HTPC users on the market with a nice array of connections for such a small board. We have a legacy COM port for user’s who may still want or need it. There is also a VGA port for the integrated display, 5 USB 2.0/1.1 ports that seem to be scattered across the board in various colours including the patented USB 3.0 blue, but sadly this board hasn’t got USB 3.0 and was purely done for style purposes. You will also see an eSATA port above the 2 blue USB 2.0 ports and next to that is a Gigabit Ethernet LAN port powered by the Realtek RTL8111DL PCI-Express bus controller. The back of the board also has a 12v DC input jack as it doesn’t use a conventional power supply, PS2 connector for your keyboard and also 3 audio jacks for your speakers, line-out and microphone input which is all powered by the Realtek ALC662 6-channel HD audio codec for clear and concise sound, which is very important if using this board for HTPC purposes. It would have been nice for a digital audio connection, but needs must on a board of this size and proportion.