Jetway NC84-LF

BIOS:

The Jetway NC84 785G motherboard uses an American Megatrends Inc BIOS. There are all of the normal options one would expect to find accompanied by a small set of overclocking options. The overclocking options include CPU/HT reference clock, PCI-E reference clock, SB reference clock, processor frequency multiplier, processor voltage, AOD compatibility, VDIMM voltage, NB voltage, HT link speed, HT link width, DRAM command rate, and memory clock mode.

Linux Testing:

Our Jetway NC84 setup consisted of an AMD Sempron 3400+ clocked at 1.80GHz, 1GB of Corsair DDR2 system memory, a 16GB Super Talent SSD, and the integrated ATI Radeon HD 4200 graphics. On the software side, we were running a development snapshot of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS with the Linux 2.6.32 kernel, X.Org Server 1.7.6, Catalyst 10.4, GCC 4.4.3, and an EXT4 file-system. Installing Ubuntu 10.04 LTS to this mini ITX motherboard went well and we encountered no issues, but this is to no surprise since the AMD 785G + SB750 is not a new chipset and we have successfully used other motherboards based upon this chipset combination in the past.

In terms of LM_Sensors compatibility for monitoring the integrated system sensors, the k8temp module works as expected for monitoring the AMD Sempron core temperature, but unfortunately the Super I/O controller was not supported and thus we were unable to read any system temperatures, fan speeds, or voltage readings. This is the only shortcoming we have found with the Linux support for this Jetway mini ITX motherboard.

For those interested in the performance of this motherboard you can find an extensive set of test results on Phoronix Global for the Jetway NC84-LF. You can also compare your system's performance directly to our test setup using the Phoronix Test Suite by running phoronix-test-suite benchmark phoronix-16520-2610-1947.

Conclusion:

While this is our first look at an AMD mini ITX motherboard that bears the 785G + SB750 chipset and is designed for use with desktop processors, the Jetway NC84-LF has been working out as a rather nice motherboard from our weeks of testing. The only Linux-related complaint we have is the lack of system monitoring support within the kernel and LM_Sensors, but this should come at some point and is by no means a showstopper to most users setting up the motherboard in a common environment. The connectivity on this motherboard is great with the four Serial ATA 2.0 ports, two eSATA ports, and VGA/DVI/HDMI ports for the Radeon HD 4200 IGP.

This would be an ideal motherboard for a HTPC setup running Linux if XvBA (X-Video Bitstream Acceleration) was in a better and more widely adopted state than just being exposed through a VA-API front-end. It would have been nicer to see a NVIDIA chipset in there so VDPAU could come into play, but if AMD's lack of viable UVD2 video decoding and playback under Linux does not scare you away or you are not looking towards this ITX motherboard for an HTPC, this is a nice product.