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Jetway's JNF77-N1G6-LF: VIA's Nano Put to the Test
George Ross, August 19, 2009

Introduction
With environmentally friendly or 'green' computing solutions being all the rage nowadays I thought it a good time to check out a low powered motherboard featuring VIA's Nano processor. Let's find out how this low power computing solution stacks up against a more traditional Athlon 64 X2 4600+ based setup.

Packaging & Contents

The JNF77-N1G6-LF comes in a box that does its job of protecting the motherboard from damage during shipping. The included accessories are nothing to get excited about giving you an I/O back plate, an IDE cable, a SATA cable, a driver CD, and a manual.


Layout

Being that this is a mini ITX motherboard Jetway has done a good job with the layout. The memory can be installed without hassle, and the USB headers are easily accessed. The SATA headers are also well placed. The only thing that I see missing is a floppy disk header. You may also have noticed that this board only has a single 40mm fan cooling the processor and the northbridge is passively cooled so it doesn't make to much noise.

Test Hardware
All tests were conducted with the Chrome9 HC3 IGP only being given 64MB of memory to work with. Here the rest of the particulars on the test systems.

Processors VIA Nano L2200 @ 1.6GHz AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+ @ 2.4GHz
Motherboards Jetway JNF77-N1G6-LF GIGABYTE GA-MA770-DS3
Memory GeIL 2GB DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) @ 667 MHz (DDR 1333) 5-5-5-17 Single Channel Mode GeIL 2GB DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) @ 800 MHz (DDR 1600) 5-5-5-15 Single Channel Mode
Hard Drive Western Digital Raptor WD1500ADFD 150GB 10000 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 1.5Gb/s
Video Cards VIA Chrome9 HC3 IGP
Driver version 21.09.01L		 ASUS EAH3450 Radeon 3450
Catalyst 9.7
Optical Disk Drive Pioneer DVR-111DBK
Power Supply FSP AX450-PN 450W
Operating System Windows Vista Ultimate x86 SP1

General Computing Benchmarks

As you can see the JNF77-N1G6-LF cannot compete Athlon 64 X2 4600+ based setup, but that is not the goal of the JNF77-N1G6-LF be the fastest computing solution out there. Considering the Nano L2200 processor has 800MHz less clock speed than the Athlon 64 X2 4600+ and only has one processing core I think that the JNF77-N1G6-LF puts up some decent numbers.

Power Consumption

This is were the JNF77-N1G6-LF shines it keeps the power bill down. Notice that even at load the JNF77-N1G6-LF consumes less power that the Athlon 64 X2 4600+ based setup does when it is at an idle state.

Conclusion
So a $135 gives you the ability to run the resource hogging Windows Vista while keeping the power consumption low. The JNF77-N1G6-LF could be what you are looking for when building a computer for someone who doesn't need more than the ability to check emails and surf the web. It could also be used for a NAS setup, web server, or car PC. It is nice to see a small form factor low power computing solution that can run the latest software.

Stay tuned for overclocking the Nano L2200 processor.

JetWay JNF77-N1G6-LF VIA Nano L2200 (1.6GHz) Mini ITX Motherboard/CPU Combo
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