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I am wondering what you all think about when they are released building a ITX box with a Pentium N3700 – Quad-core CPU @ 1.6 GHz (Burst: 2.40 GHz) with 2MB L2 cache, 6W TDP when they are released. It should come with a PCIE 16x 4x slot and I am wondering if it would be able to do some 1080p gaming with a GTX 750ti or I will repupose a HD7750 I have and move the 750ti into the box with the hd7750.

Thoughts? I have a 1080p TV that needs a small HTPC in the future and I am thinking about using a braswell CPU with a dedicated card.

If you're careful with your selection of mini-ITX case, you don't have to give up using a gaming graphics card.

In an HTPC environment, a relatively wide and short case like the Silverstone Milo ML07 fits well into your stack of AV components and holds 13" graphics cards. If you're really looking for the taller shoebox shape, something like the Sugo SG08-Lite can still accommodate a 12.2" graphics card.

If you're not hard-core with your living room gaming, the integrated Iris Pro graphics in Broadwell should be adequate, allowing for a very small form factor PC with no graphics card.

The CPU architecture is Silvermont rather than Haswell which means much lower IPC, it's an Atom replacement for tablets and netbooks, made from repackaged cherry-trail processors.

It's no match for Even the lowest-end Sandy/Ivy/Haswell celeron derivitives, but I would probably say it's in the same ballpark as lower-end Core2 like the E4400. That should be capable of running things like DotA2, most Unity-based or Unreal-based games, and even current AAA titles as long as they let you scale down detail levels.

The impressive feat for Silvermont is the low power envelope, but if you're putting a dGPU in there you obviously aren't going for low-power - so I'd recommend aiming for a socket 1150 processor if you can. Even a dual-core Celeron is going to be better. You can get a Haswell dual-core for $46 (Celeron G1820) and you can get decent-brand mITX 1150 boards for $55 if you shop around. That's $100 for cpu/board combo that will idle at very low wattage (say 10W) but provide you performance not too far off an i3 when you actually need it.

Atoms make great file servers, video streamers, vintage gaming systems but they're not up to the task of modern titles even at low settings.

It does seem an odd thing to do. Why go for an ultra low power <10W SoC and then combine it with a 75W graphics card and a huge Mini-ITX case that's ten or twenty times the size of a normal N3700 system?

A Celeron G1820 will be almost as cheap (possibly cheaper), exactly the same size and comfortably faster. Silvermont (and presumably Goldmont) is great when your priority is low power consumption or small size but they don't offer great performance for the money so I can't see the point of using them in any system big enough to take a full height graphics card.

A Celeron G1820 will be almost as cheap (possibly cheaper), exactly the same size and comfortably faster.

I wouldn't go with anything less then the Pentium Anniversary Edition. Anything lower will bottleneck your system.

I simply can't recommend anything that has its roots in the Atom line for anything but a mobile device. I picked up a Foxconn Celeron J1800 board for $35 brand new (no rebates) and I'm amazed at how inept it is at certain tasks. Its a 2.41Ghz dual core with 2.58Ghz turbo and a 10W TDP and I find it extremely sluggish on Windows 8.1 with 4GB of DDR3 and an SSD. I even disabled real time protection in Windows Defender because it caused such high CPU usage.

I was just using it for a file\media server, but recently attempted to use it for a basic HTPC and it stutters and chops and drops frames at random on Amazon Instant Video using Chrome, Firefox or IE with either Flash or Silverlight. Some times the CPU usage drops to the mid 30s but its still choppy, so the GPU may be the bottleneck there, but that isn't saying much. Unless you can get one super cheap there's simply no reason to base a non-mobile system on any Silvermont based CPU unless its merely going to be a light duty server.

In comparison, my old HTPC with an Athlon X2 4850e 2.6Ghz, 4GB DDR2 and an 8600GT with a mechanical hard drive (everything from ~2007) is considerably smoother and has no issues with any video playback I've attempted on it. According to Passmark (which isn't totally accurate, but is worth something IMO) the single threaded score of the J1800 is only 554, where the 8 year old low-tdp Athlon X2 4850e manages 757. The N3540 (closest thing to the N3700 currently) only manages 537 in the single threaded benchmark. Most likely the N3700 will be even slower because it has such a low TDP and lower base clock speed. You're basically settling for Athlon XP performance with newer instruction sets and more cores.

As others have said, any socket 1150 or even 1155 cpu will use very little power at idle and be several times faster than anything you'll get in a glorified tablet CPU.

whm1974 wrote:

A Celeron G1820 will be almost as cheap (possibly cheaper), exactly the same size and comfortably faster.

I wouldn't go with anything less then the Pentium Anniversary Edition. Anything lower will bottleneck your system.

The only real-world difference between those two chips is an 18% clockspeed advantage to the Pentium.

This is clearly not an overclocking build, and for HTPC duties the IGP's are identical so adding $30 for an 18% clockspeed advantage in a low-power mITX build isn't even a good idea in my opinion.

If you need more than a Celeron in this type of build, the next logical step up is to an i3 that can handle four threads for newer AAA games and a high-end i3 at that with the full compliment of HD4600 graphics for various Quicksync and encode/decode capabilities. The two graphics cards being discussed are slow enough that processor is not going to be the bottleneck in the vast majority of games. In games where the processor is a bottleneck, the solution is a quad-core, not a Pentium G3258.

Unless you're doing fairly low-end gaming on it, I'd suggest instead something like the i3-4130T (35 watt), or if you need 4 cores, the i5-4440S (65 watt). Atom probably won't cut it unless you are just doing classic console emulation or the like.

If you need more than a Celeron in this type of build, the next logical step up is to an i3 that can handle four threads for newer AAA games and a high-end i3 at that with the full compliment of HD4600 graphics for various Quicksync and encode/decode capabilities. The two graphics cards being discussed are slow enough that processor is not going to be the bottleneck in the vast majority of games. In games where the processor is a bottleneck, the solution is a quad-core, not a Pentium G3258.

You are right an i3 would be a better choice. And a i5 would be even better.

Since we're basically describing the specs of the Alienware Alpha, why not just recommend one of those? They keep getting cheaper and cheaper, and you'd be hard pressed to beat the specs of one (4130t, GTX 860M (750 Ti basically), 4GB DDR3, 500GB hard drive, Windows 8.1 and an Xbox controller) for a similar price ($300-$450 depending on the sale).

I'm going to resurrect this thread --but mainly so I can provide new information from a topic that was too early to do more than perform good speculation on, and to show a project I'm working on.

First, for reference, even if you find an N3700 board with a full-length PCIe slot (I know of one, Asrock's N3700-M mATX board), Braswell supports no more than an x4 PCIe card max for data. Sure, a graphics card will work in that slot, but you won't get its full performance and as others have said, you're putting a GPU that drains at least 45-60w (let's estimate Geforce GTX 950 for fun, since you're at 1080p) on a board that consumes probably 15w (this is including both the CPU,but any other voltage circuitry the board uses and its peripherals such as USB, LAN, RAM, etc.).

Secondly, a number of Braswell boards don't have the 4pin or 6pin CPU power connector; they don't need it. They either have a 24-pin ATX (and that's it) or an AC power jack for a PicoPSU (running a Braswell board consumes more power off an ATX power supply since they're generally less efficient). This means you might not be able to power a graphics card anyway unless it's pretty entry level (e.g., Geforce 750 or maybe 750Ti).

Everyone already mentioned Braswell's gaming performance compared to an i3, so I won't go into that, though it's probably fine for League of Legends or such at 720p, possibly WoW, that kind of stuff.

Where Braswell *is* interesting (and wasn't until months after its release is that this past fall, drivers came out to unlock its full potential: hardware H.265 HEVC decoding, even at 4K resolutions. Both on Windows *and* Linux. Kodi v16 is in release-candidate stage to take advantage of this, and 17 is in alpha, but should go even further. Making this a killer option if you want to do an HTPC for a reasonable price and power envelope. The N3700 is the best for this both because it has 4 CPU cores (the N3000 and N3050 have only 2), and because it has a full 16 EUs in its GPU (the slower N3150 has four cores, but only 12 EUs).

I wanted an inexpensive project, and my HTPC has been a very nice system, but I wanted it to be a little lower power, and the interesting thing is that other than Skylake, no other Intel iGPU has full HEVC decode in hardware (Haswell and Broadwell have hybrid decoding, which is cool, but still aren't as advanced). It's when I saw this board.



The Asrock N3700-ITX isn't perfect. Honestly, my last board from Asrock (an middle-end Z68 board) had a very checkered experience, followed by a lousy customer service experience that caused me to RMA it. It also doesn't have an m.2 slot, which I'd have hoped for. But unlike the Braswell Intel NUC systems, it has two RAM sockets (dual-channel), and it has almost every other feature I'd want for the price. It's also one of a very small number of boards that actually have the N3700 instead of the N3150. Also, since I'm going with my existing case, I can still hook up the BD-ROM drive.

My wife's system will be getting the ASUS H97i-plus and Core i5-4590S from my HTPC. The HTPC will be getting this board, and a G.Skill 2 x 4GB memory kit. I have a 128GB Samsung 2.5" SSD that will replace the 128GB M.2 Samsung SSD I had. The board should arrive toward the end of this week. Very interested to see how things perform, as media playback (Kodi, Youtube) and a little web browsing is what I do with the HTPC.

LoneWolf15 wrote:

and the interesting thing is that other than Skylake, no other Intel iGPU has full HEVC decode in hardware (Haswell and Broadwell have hybrid decoding, which is cool, but still aren't as advanced).

Skylake is Hybrid as well, it'll be Kaby Lake at the earliest before it gets a pure hardware decoder. I thought Braswell was the also hybrid, have you done any tests or do you have any sources that say it's a dedicated hardware decoder?

As far as I know, for integrated graphics, it's only AMD Carizzo that has dedicated decoder circuitry, and that for Main profile but not Main10.

If you've waited this long, why wouldn't you go with Skylake now?

Lonewolf15, I just bought this same board as well for my htpc last week. Unfortunately the ram I ordered is on back order, so its still sitting in it's box while I wait patiently. I'm certainly interested in what you find out for performance. My old AMD E-350 was just getting too sluggish in general tasks and it couldn't play 1080 YouTube videos, so I think this should be a nice upgrade

Sargent Duck wrote:

Lonewolf15, I just bought this same board as well for my htpc last week. Unfortunately the ram I ordered is on back order, so its still sitting in it's box while I wait patiently. I'm certainly interested in what you find out for performance. My old AMD E-350 was just getting too sluggish in general tasks and it couldn't play 1080 YouTube videos, so I think this should be a nice upgrade

Yep - I had an E350 netbook (Thinkpad x120e), and that thing was sluggish. Decent bit better with Windows 8 (10 wasn't out yet) and the Netflix app (hardware accelerated well) though. Always my concern with these low-powered netbook (SoC nowadays) machines.

EndlessWaves wrote:

LoneWolf15 wrote:

and the interesting thing is that other than Skylake, no other Intel iGPU has full HEVC decode in hardware (Haswell and Broadwell have hybrid decoding, which is cool, but still aren't as advanced).

Skylake is Hybrid as well, it'll be Kaby Lake at the earliest before it gets a pure hardware decoder. I thought Braswell was the also hybrid, have you done any tests or do you have any sources that say it's a dedicated hardware decoder?

As far as I know, for integrated graphics, it's only AMD Carizzo that has dedicated decoder circuitry, and that for Main profile but not Main10.

Skylake and Braswell are full, but only 8-bit full, not 10-bit full. It will be Kaby Lake/Apollo Lake before 10-bit HEVC decode is available.

JustAnEngineer wrote:

If you've waited this long, why wouldn't you go with Skylake now?

Skylake is an expensive processor for an HTPC, in that I'd need more expensive RAM, a mainboard, and a CPU. Braswell is a SoC so the mainboard and CPU are together. I can't justify that much in my HTPC; the reason I justified the Haswell i5-4590S was that I got a sweet deal used. And my wife could benefit a lot more from its power as she's on her system just about every day, while the HTPC only gets used several days a week. I've got a Geforce 750Ti in her system for the graphics work already, and everything will match up nice. It will replace her i5-2500, which performs very well, but this will save 30w of power or more, and add some features that Sandy Bridge didn't have. What I need in the HTPC is the GPU, and Braswell and Skylake share that. I don't need Skylake's CPU horsepower, as I'm not playing games.

Also, by the time Kaby Lake comes out, Apollo Lake (the successor to Braswell) will be available. The rumblings I've read from Intel employees and industry notes are that this CPU will have 10-bit HEVC in hardware. However, that's going to be Q3-Q4 of this year, and if it's anything like Braswell, it will take six months before Intel has graphics drivers that take full advantage of its capabilities. With Apollo Lake once again being meant for the inexpensive side of the market, It would likely be fairly easy to switch it out at a low cost mid-to-late 2017 if I wish.

Sargent Duck wrote:

Lonewolf15, I just bought this same board as well for my htpc last week. Unfortunately the ram I ordered is on back order, so its still sitting in it's box while I wait patiently. I'm certainly interested in what you find out for performance. My old AMD E-350 was just getting too sluggish in general tasks and it couldn't play 1080 YouTube videos, so I think this should be a nice upgrade

I ordered the following G.Skill DDR3L RAM:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820231703

On sale for a good price, good latency and timings. They've been my go-to for years now; it's probably luck of the draw, but I've never had a stick of G.Skill go bad, something I can't say for Crucial/Micron, Corsair, or Kingston.

What OS will you be running? I've been running 8.1 Enterprise; I'm debating between that and 10 Pro (will probably go with 8.1 at this point). Note that Windows 7 requires some tweaking to get working with this board; unless you have a SATA optical drive, you'll have to slipstream USB drivers into a 7 install to boot from USB device.

LoneWolf15 wrote:

What OS will you be running? I've been running 8.1 Enterprise; I'm debating between that and 10 Pro (will probably go with 8.1 at this point). Note that Windows 7 requires some tweaking to get working with this board; unless you have a SATA optical drive, you'll have to slipstream USB drivers into a 7 install to boot from USB device.

OK, when did that change? I've installed Windows 7 from USB flash drives (mainly the Windows 7 download tool, possibly also Rufus) and USB DVD drives many, many times now. Never failed me, with everything from a Pentium 4 to a Haswell.

Unless... wait, wait... do the newer Braswell/Skylake boards not fallback to USB 2 in hardware if the drivers aren't loaded/the OS doesn't recognize USB 3 (which Win7 doesn't by default)? Because I've installed Win7 on the zbook (which only has USB 3 ports) through a USB DVD drive, and it worked fine.

localhostrulez wrote:

LoneWolf15 wrote:

What OS will you be running? I've been running 8.1 Enterprise; I'm debating between that and 10 Pro (will probably go with 8.1 at this point). Note that Windows 7 requires some tweaking to get working with this board; unless you have a SATA optical drive, you'll have to slipstream USB drivers into a 7 install to boot from USB device.

OK, when did that change? I've installed Windows 7 from USB flash drives (mainly the Windows 7 download tool, possibly also Rufus) and USB DVD drives many, many times now. Never failed me, with everything from a Pentium 4 to a Haswell.

Unless... wait, wait... do the newer Braswell/Skylake boards not fallback to USB 2 in hardware if the drivers aren't loaded/the OS doesn't recognize USB 3 (which Win7 doesn't by default)? Because I've installed Win7 on the zbook (which only has USB 3 ports) through a USB DVD drive, and it worked fine.

Easier explanation - applies to Braswell/Skylake. Direct from Asrock.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQq7Yvf ... e=youtu.be

Windows 7 doesn't natively support xHCI as I understand it. I believe that Asrock's boards have both USB3 (Intel) ports, and the remainder (USB2) are third-party and not natively supported by the Windows 7 installer. Asrock has a Windows 7 patcher program, but I understand some people have had difficulty with it.

I'm using Windows 8.1 with Classic Shell myself. It solves most problems I have with the OS, runs much faster than Win7, and has native support for booting off USB key. If you want 7, another option might be to just temporarily hook up a spare SATA optical drive and install everything outside the case. While it's rare I play an optical disc, I have a BD-ROM just for those rare occasions when someone might bring media over still. I'm still using an older nMedia HTPC 7000B case so I had options for full slots and the drive, and because I loved that I could buy an optional 20x2-line LCD display, so it looks a lot like a quality receiver.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6811204042

LoneWolf15 wrote:

Sargent Duck wrote:

Lonewolf15, I just bought this same board as well for my htpc last week. Unfortunately the ram I ordered is on back order, so its still sitting in it's box while I wait patiently. I'm certainly interested in what you find out for performance. My old AMD E-350 was just getting too sluggish in general tasks and it couldn't play 1080 YouTube videos, so I think this should be a nice upgrade

I ordered the following G.Skill DDR3L RAM:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820231703

On sale for a good price, good latency and timings. They've been my go-to for years now; it's probably luck of the draw, but I've never had a stick of G.Skill go bad, something I can't say for Crucial/Micron, Corsair, or Kingston.

What OS will you be running? I've been running 8.1 Enterprise; I'm debating between that and 10 Pro (will probably go with 8.1 at this point). Note that Windows 7 requires some tweaking to get working with this board; unless you have a SATA optical drive, you'll have to slipstream USB drivers into a 7 install to boot from USB device.

I've used all sorts of memory from my early days (P3), G.Skill/Crucial/Kingston/Mushkin/Corsair, never had a bad stick so I kinda just go with whatever is on sale. I called my local computer store that I ordered the memory from (it was on sale). ETA February 5th. 'DOH!

I'll be throwing Windows10 on there. My tablet & gaming computer both have Windows 10, so it seems kinda like a no-brainer.

LoneWolf15 wrote:

The Asrock N3700-ITX isn't perfect. Honestly, my last board from Asrock (an middle-end Z68 board) had a very checkered experience, followed by a lousy customer service experience that caused me to RMA it. It also doesn't have an m.2 slot, which I'd have hoped for. But unlike the Braswell Intel NUC systems, it has two RAM sockets (dual-channel), and it has almost every other feature I'd want for the price. It's also one of a very small number of boards that actually have the N3700 instead of the N3150. Also, since I'm going with my existing case, I can still hook up the BD-ROM drive.

The M350 Mini Box seems perfect for the Asrock N3700, assuming you don't want to record anything. But it definetely is small. Unlike some mini ITX cases which look to be the same size as an ATX case.

http://www.mini-box.com/M350-enclosure-with-picoPSU-80-and-60W-adapter

EndlessWaves wrote:

LoneWolf15 wrote:

and the interesting thing is that other than Skylake, no other Intel iGPU has full HEVC decode in hardware (Haswell and Broadwell have hybrid decoding, which is cool, but still aren't as advanced).

Skylake is Hybrid as well, it'll be Kaby Lake at the earliest before it gets a pure hardware decoder. I thought Braswell was the also hybrid, have you done any tests or do you have any sources that say it's a dedicated hardware decoder?

As far as I know, for integrated graphics, it's only AMD Carizzo that has dedicated decoder circuitry, and that for Main profile but not Main10.

I'm going to update what I previously said, as part of it was incorrect.

Braswell's HD graphics starts with a Broadwell base, not SkyLake as I previously said. However, it has bits for H.265/HEVC hardware decode for 8-bit. The only current 10-bit HEVC hardware decode I'm aware of is in Maxwell-2 GPUs (e.g., Geforce GTX 950/960).

http://nucblog.net/2015/08/braswell-nuc ... yh-review/
http://nucblog.net/2015/08/hevc-decodin ... l-is-here/

There are additional references, but 10-bit HEVC decode in iGPU hardware won't be around until Kaby Lake/Apollo Lake. In the meantime, the N3700 Braswell leads the SoC pack, having quad-cores with the highest clocks, and 16 EUs, the highest number of graphics execution units in the chip family. Ensuring you get a Braswell that supports dual-channel RAM should also improve performance. Sadly, the Braswell NUCs from Intel lack this, and a number of other micro form-factor barebones systems don't go higher than the N3150 (slightly lower clocks, lower graphics clocks, 12 EUs).

Looks like a really cool board. The four (4) SATA ports is very hard to find on embedded mini-ITX, making it a good candidate for NAS use. Unfortunately, lots of others are also reporting the same USB issues (no BIOS support, making USB not functional for booting, keyboard/mouse outside of OS). On a board that is by design not going to be used with an internal optical drive, it's beyond boneheaded on Asrock's part. Hopefully they can fix it with a BIOS update.

The Egg wrote:

Looks like a really cool board. The four (4) SATA ports is very hard to find on embedded mini-ITX, making it a good candidate for NAS use. Unfortunately, lots of others are also reporting the same USB issues (no BIOS support, making USB not functional for booting, keyboard/mouse outside of OS). On a board that is by design not going to be used with an internal optical drive, it's beyond boneheaded on Asrock's part. Hopefully they can fix it with a BIOS update.

Those issues aren't just Asrock. The Intel Braswell NUC has some of the same issues, and they're mainly with Windows 7, because there isn't xHCI handoff.

Windows 8.1/10 will install off bootable USB just fine as I understand it. Windows 7 requires slipstreaming drivers in. From everything I hear, Skylake has the same issue with Windows 7 too.

One option would be to hook up a SATA ODD just long enough to install the OS, and then not use it again.

Yep - xHCI, and Windows 7 not having native USB 3.0 support. Basically, no USB 3 functionality unless the drivers are installed/slipstreamed. I wonder what this means for safe mode and the like, on a machine that's already set up?

For what it's worth... it sounds like USB optical drives AND USB keyboards/mice are out for setup, unless you slipstream the driver. What a pain. (Doubly so on new enterprise notebooks without DVD drives - I guess you have to slipstream the install files? Because the enterprise's demand for Win7 certainly hasn't gone anywhere yet. Those things are shipping with 7 left and right by default, even with Skylake.) Sounds like that's the only major thing at the moment that 7 can't handle. (As opposed to XP a few years back, when 4GB+ was common, SSDs were hitting the market in greater numbers, quad core desktops were getting common, and wifi was everywhere - not stuff it handled well.)

On some machines you can disable USB3 in the bios, so that the ports fallback to USB2. I had to do that once on a laptop which had only USB3 ports.

I've been wondering about that - some machines apparently let you set the USB mice/keyboard to PS/2 compatibility mode for Win7 setup (not for regular use), but that's about it. Haven't tried them myself.

My zbook only has USB3 ports, but a USB DVD drive, USB mouse, and my USB 3 flash drive work perfectly fine during setup on USB2. The USB3 side usually gets detected once you load the drivers (and then the flash drive can work at full speed). But supposedly some old devices/oddball equipment work fine on USB2, but not USB3 ports (even though it should fallback). Hmm...

My board and RAM should arrive tomorrow.

Pairing with a Samsung PM830 128GB SSD retired from a Dell desktop (I don't need larger, I stream from my server). I'm going to measure the mounting holes for the heatsink/fan too; it's a long shot, but it'd be neat if one of the two mounting patterns on the board worked with the Noctua NH-L9i from my ASUS H97i-Plus. I have a LiteOn BD-ROM in the system, and one of the early (CWT-made) Corsair CX430M power supplies (though I might shop around for a more efficient low-power model and move this to the test bench).

I installed Windows 7 on a N3150DC-ITX yesterday and had the USB problem. The Asrock Windows 7 USB Patcher did not work for me at all. Went to (google codeabitwiser windows 7 with usb3)(sorry not allowed to post links) and followed the well documented instructions and had a working USB drive in 10 minutes.