The Jetway Hummer HA08-LF motherboard

Let's have a look. We'll start off with the box and bundle.

The bundle and packaging. Jetway makes sure you'll receive everything you need to get started. Not a rather excessive bundle though. Drivers, cables, manual and motherboard. The extra gadgets and gizmos are left out to save on the pricing model.

The Hummer  motherboard comes with 2 PCI, 2 PCIe x16 (either 1 x PCIe x16 or 2 x PCIe x 8 for CrossFireX) and 2 PCIe x1 slots. The board incorporates Realtek Ethernet (RTL 8111C) and Realtek ALC 888S 8-channel HD audio. First impression, pretty decent design. Yet there are some design flaws I spot right away. I will address this in the photo-shoot.

Color wise the board looks a bit shoddy. Too many colors are used I say, it's not bad though. We see a passive cooler sits on the motherboard north-bridge and a nice big heatspreaders on its power circuitry (MOSFETS). We see that Jetway uses good quality capacitors, nice.

The mainboard's back panel shows off standard PS/2 ports. Then VGA, DVI and HDMI connectors, nice to see all three incorporated, only four USB 2.0 ports that could have been improved to six or eight, 1x eSATA, 1x Gigabit Ethernet, and then jacks for 8.1-channel connectivity.

What I really miss here is SPDIF, an the optical connector (TOSLINK), especially with HTPCs in mind (where boards like these really shine). You've got everything from 2D/3D display, Gigabit Ethernet, and sound all integrated into one mainboard. But you really want that TOSLINK as well.

Directly behind the back panel we spot a 8-pin CPU power header. Nice, that port alone can deliver an additional 150 Watts of current to the processor.