When Intel announced an accelerated roadmap for its Molecule SoC range in May 2011, the ship's company's 22nm Silvermont microarchitecture was scheduled for a 2013 release and would later receive a 14nm die shrink in 2014, codenamed Airmont. Even so, setbacks in nonindustrial the 14nm process delayed the arrival of Broadwell parts, peculiarly the high operation variants.

Although it launched in 2013, we didn't get our hands happening the desktop Bay Trail-D variants until August of 2014, once Asrock started hawking its Bay Trail Motherboards. At the time we checked out the Asrock D1800M (Celeron J1800), Q1900M (Celeron J1900) and Q2900 (Pentium J2900).

To retread, the Celeron J1800 was a dual-core part clocked at 2.58GHz with a tiny 1MB L2 hive up, while the J1900 had four cores working at 2.41GHz and double the cache. The included GPU was a heavily thinned HD Graphics engine with just four performance units, which helped Intel keep the Bay Shack-D power requirements at a minimum.

The Pentium J2900, like the J1900, likewise featured quatern cores clocked at 2.41GHz with a 2MB L2 cache and the same rubbish iv EU GPU. The only difference being that the J2900 could soul-overclock on the take flight with a maximum break speed of 2.67GHz, allowing for 6% much performance along average.

We saved that the Celeron J1900 was a healthier respect than the J2900 as it offered a similar level of performance at a very much lower Leontyne Price. Overall, in anything non-3D related, the J1900 was the way to go for extreme budget builders while AMD's AM1 platform was punter equipped for 3D rendering.

Now we give Intel's novel Braswell SoCs, which promise to be quicker across the board patc also overwhelming less power. A few months ago Intel quietly launched its first desktop Braswell SoC solutions, oblation twofold-core and quad-marrow Celeron models along a single quad-core Pentium.

Destined for entry-stage laptops and desktops, the new chips are manufactured using Intel's 14nm unconscious process and include the mobile Celeron N3000, N3050, N3150, and Pentium N3700. The last three will be made in versions for desktop systems and today we cause the N3050 and N3700 in hand.

Model Cores /
Threads		 Absolute frequency /
Turbo		 L2
cache		 GPU base/boost Computer memory TDP Price
Celeron N3000 2 / 2 1.04 / 2.08 GHz 1 MB 320MHz / 600MHz DDR3-1600 4W $107
Celeron N3050 2 / 2 1.60 / 2.16 GHz 1 MB 320MHz / 600MHz DDR3-1600 6W $107
Celeron J1800 2 / 2 2.41 / 2.58 GHz 1 MB 688MHz / 792MHz DDR3-1333 10W $72
Celeron N3150 4 / 4 1.60 / 2.08 GHz 2 MB 320MHz / 640MHz DDR3-1600 6W $107
Pentium N3700 4 / 4 1.60 / 2.40 GHz 2 MB 400MHz / 700MHz DDR3-1600 6W $161
Pentium J2900 4 / 4 2.41 / 2.67 GHz 2 MB 688MHz / 792MHz DDR3-1333 10W $94

As you can get wind higher up, Braswell's base operating frequencies are much lower than Embayment Go after-D parts. The background Braswell models start at clean 1.6GHz whereas the J1800 and J2900 were clocked 50% high, let alone that the new Pentium N3700's turbo frequency only matches the base clock of the Pentium J2900.

Patc the marrow counts and cache remain the same for corresponding models, the DDR3 memory support has been upgraded to 1600MHz from 1333MHz. The TDP paygrad has also been minimized from 10 watts to just half dozen.

To boot to the raw Airmont CPU cores, the HD Artwork engine has been updated to the Genesis 8 LP architecture, fair busy 16 execution units clocked as high as 700MHz. It will be unputdownable to see how Intel's updated IGP compares to the R3 (Radeon HD 8400) inside AMD's Athlon 5350 APU.

Asrock's Mini-ITX Braswell Boards

Asrock already has over six Intel Braswell motherboards on offer, including a range of MicroATX and Mini-ITX boards.

The Miniskirt-ITX models are the preferred choice for flat-growing business leader calculation and consequently we are releas to admit a look at the N3700-ITX and N3050B-ITX, the most expensive and most cheap versions.

Midmost there is also the N3150-ITX, which is likely the advisable value option only we Don't have this model to examine.

Asrock N3700-ITX

For a budget motherboard the Asrock N3700-ITX is healthier equipped than unsurprising. Asrock has included 4 SATA 6Gb/s ports, six USB 3.0 ports, 7.1 channel audio, Gigabit Ethernet, and a DisplayPort output alongside HDMI and DVI.

Unfortunately, there isn't a sonorous distance PCIe x16 time slot. For that you'll need to deal the MicroATX N3700M, which also supports criterial screen background storage instead of SO-DIMM the like the N3700-ITX.

However, the N3700M doesn't have a miniskirt-PCIe slot whereas the N3700-ITX does, making IT quick and abundant to admit a WiF/Bluetooth faculty.

Like the Asrock Q2900-ITX before it, the N3700-ITX includes a passively-cooled double-bass-profile heatsink all over the processor.

Compared to the Q2900-ITX, the N3700-ITX not only features the updated Pentium N3700 processor simply it too offers two extra USB 3.0 ports, two more SATA ports and offers a DisplayPort turnout. So entirely full the N3700-ITX is a nice climb.

Asrock N3050B-ITX

The N3050B-ITX really is a simple motherboard that has been premeditated for extremely incomprehensive budgets. That said, the feature list is similar to the past generation's flagship plug-in, offering quaternity USB 3.0 ports and two SATA 6Gb/s ports.

The display connectivity list is missing DisplayPort but picks in the lead the more low-end friendly VGA (D-Sub) output, spell HDMI is even enclosed.

The supported 7.1 channel audio has been downgraded from the Realtek ALC892 codec used by the N3700-ITX to the more budget conscious ALC887. Bequest hold up is prevalent here with the N3050B-ITX self-praise a Collateral Port, COM port and two PS/2 ports on the I/O panel.

Onboard we find the same passive heatsink, this time taking care of the dual-core Celeron N3050.

There are two SO-DIMM slots which support up to 16GB of DDR3/DDR3L 1600 memory.

Sadly, while the mateless PCIe 2.0 x1 slot stiff, the mini-PCIe one-armed bandit is lacking, substance WiFi digest wish need to glucinium added through other means.