2015-05-21, 09:09
And BSW boards are finally here!! Well, not quite, as the boards are not yet available for sale, and there are still no boards with DC input, but ASRock really made some nice boards with excellent specs -- at least on paper.
Look at the available product range here: ASRock Braswell boards
Two of these looks very promising, but I leave to you guys to decide on this. There is a board with the Quad-core Pentium (N3700) and the one with the Quad-core Celeron (N3150).
Comparison of the two SoC's by Intel: N3700 vs N3150
In terms of CPU power I think there are not too much differences, the Celeron will be slower by a margin in real world performance (like with desktop Celeron and Pentium CPUs).
However, comparing the GPU on the two SoC's (N3700 vs N3150):
- base frequency: 400 MHz vs 320 MHz
- burst frequency: 700 MHz vs 640 MHz
- EUs: 16 vs 12
I hope that the lower specs of N3150 and it's 12 EUs are still good enough for hw deinterlacing of 1080i without any hiccups.
Probably we will see this once they hit the market and first tests are performed by you guys (I don't care about other site's synthetic benchmarks).
And both boards have a SPIDIF optical out, and that is really great! Thinking about a small home server? There are actually 4 SATA3 ports onboard, something that is more then great again! There is also support for "Supports HDMI with max. resolution up to 4K x 2K (3840x2160) @ 30Hz or 2560x1600 @ 60Hz", not that I personally really care about this (however, H.265/HEVC @ level 5 (GPU accelerated) sounds interesting).
My concern is the Realtek RTL8111GR LAN, as I have read many bad reviews with Realtek LAN and Linux. I hope these things are resolved and newer kernels and/or drivers doesn't have problems with this.
We also get a PCIe 2.0 slot, though limited to x1, and a miniPCIe slot for WiFi cards (not that this makes too much sense to use g/n either for htpc or home server), but maybe new wifi standards will be also supported? The PCIe slot might be good to put in a decent Intel network card, if the integrated Realtek really underperformes. Or a decent sound card for Hi-Fi music enthusiasts like Xonar, and there you go.
I'm afraid we will miss again CEC support, just as CIR. Would have been nice to see these two on all boards.
Anyway, here is the N3700-ITX and the N3150-ITX board.
And, I'm very curious about the price. And just can't wait to receive the good news from fritsch that everything is working fine
)))
EDIT: until we don't see the DC versions of the board (and unfortunately it looks no N3700 with DC will be available, just N3150) we are left with the sweetest questions in terms of power: what power supply to use with these perfect low power boards? Somewhere around 40-50W would be more then enough, depending on the number of SATA drives and their type. Anyone seen one like that, a picoPSU lowets is 90W if I'm not mistaken. Perhaps a DC-DC power board, I saw there are versions with 60-75W.
Look at the available product range here: ASRock Braswell boards
Two of these looks very promising, but I leave to you guys to decide on this. There is a board with the Quad-core Pentium (N3700) and the one with the Quad-core Celeron (N3150).
Comparison of the two SoC's by Intel: N3700 vs N3150
In terms of CPU power I think there are not too much differences, the Celeron will be slower by a margin in real world performance (like with desktop Celeron and Pentium CPUs).
However, comparing the GPU on the two SoC's (N3700 vs N3150):
- base frequency: 400 MHz vs 320 MHz
- burst frequency: 700 MHz vs 640 MHz
- EUs: 16 vs 12
I hope that the lower specs of N3150 and it's 12 EUs are still good enough for hw deinterlacing of 1080i without any hiccups.
Probably we will see this once they hit the market and first tests are performed by you guys (I don't care about other site's synthetic benchmarks).
And both boards have a SPIDIF optical out, and that is really great! Thinking about a small home server? There are actually 4 SATA3 ports onboard, something that is more then great again! There is also support for "Supports HDMI with max. resolution up to 4K x 2K (3840x2160) @ 30Hz or 2560x1600 @ 60Hz", not that I personally really care about this (however, H.265/HEVC @ level 5 (GPU accelerated) sounds interesting).
My concern is the Realtek RTL8111GR LAN, as I have read many bad reviews with Realtek LAN and Linux. I hope these things are resolved and newer kernels and/or drivers doesn't have problems with this.
We also get a PCIe 2.0 slot, though limited to x1, and a miniPCIe slot for WiFi cards (not that this makes too much sense to use g/n either for htpc or home server), but maybe new wifi standards will be also supported? The PCIe slot might be good to put in a decent Intel network card, if the integrated Realtek really underperformes. Or a decent sound card for Hi-Fi music enthusiasts like Xonar, and there you go.
I'm afraid we will miss again CEC support, just as CIR. Would have been nice to see these two on all boards.
Anyway, here is the N3700-ITX and the N3150-ITX board.
And, I'm very curious about the price. And just can't wait to receive the good news from fritsch that everything is working fine
)))EDIT: until we don't see the DC versions of the board (and unfortunately it looks no N3700 with DC will be available, just N3150) we are left with the sweetest questions in terms of power: what power supply to use with these perfect low power boards? Somewhere around 40-50W would be more then enough, depending on the number of SATA drives and their type. Anyone seen one like that, a picoPSU lowets is 90W if I'm not mistaken. Perhaps a DC-DC power board, I saw there are versions with 60-75W.
