Jetway B860T Review
By Mark
Gill - Posted on October 12, 2002
The
BIOS
The B860T comes with a Phoenix Award BIOS
which is nearly identical to that of the EPIA, though there
are a couple of differences that are worth pointing out. Firstly,
the TV-Out selection (bottom of the photo) consists solely
of a NTSC/PAL switch:
Unlike the EPIA, the B860T has full PC Health
monitoring. There's a sensor mounted just below the CPU to
monitor temperature - not as accurate as on-die devices, but
much better than nothing:
A second sensor is mounted next to the BIOS
chip to measure system temperature. The board's current state
of health is shown on a BIOS screen.
Though the health is shown, there is no capability
for setting alarms for excessive temperatures or low fan speeds,
as can be found on many other motherboards.
Specifications
Chipset |
|
VIA PLE133T |
Memory |
|
2 x SDRAM DIMMs |
Onboard VGA
|
|
Yes (hardware DVD decoding) |
Onboard LAN |
|
Yes (10/100Mbit) |
Onboard sound
|
|
Yes (AC'97 2.1 codec) |
USB
|
|
2 onboard (+ 2 optional) |
Drive connectors
|
|
1 x floppy, 2 x IDE (ATA100) |
Expansion slots
|
|
1 x PCI |
Other expansion
|
|
1 x DOC |
PC health monitoring |
|
Yes |
Conclusion
The B860T is an interesting alternative to
the VIA EPIA board, especially due to the aggressive pricing
of the Jetway offering. The B860T provides the flexibility
and upgradability of a socketed board in a package only fractionally
larger than the EPIA, and has the capability to run processors
as powerful as those found in full-size desktop PCs. It could
find a use in embedded applications due to the Disk-On-Chip
socket, and it may well appeal to the case-modding community
due to the useful onboard headers. On the other hand, the
EPIA has the benefit of convenience, since it is truly an
all-in-one solution.
The EPIA is currently the de facto "mini
board", and it is unlikely that the Jetway will ever
challenge that. However, those that do discover the B860T
will find a very powerful little beast that answers many of
the questions that the EPIA has been unable to answer.
|