The Verdict
So there you have it, first let me state that from an aesthetical and practical point of view Jetway designed a really okay looking motherboard. But let me get the bad out of the way first. Unfortunately and probably due to the early sample at hand (this board came in straight from Jetway R&D) not everything was apparently tweaked well in the BIOS, in fact the five step Core i7 870 Turbo function was working improperly. As a result the motherboard performance was slightly below the P55 reference baseline. Overall the difference is something you could never ever experience in real-life though. But that is something that Jetway needs to address.
The second negative we stumbled into is very poor overclocking functionality and results. The reason that you guys did not see any overclock results is that tweaking with this motherboard drove me insane. We have an Intel engineering sample processor that can manage 4 GHz on an air cooler with any of the P55 motherboards we tested in the past. Reality was that we could not get this motherboard stable over 3.4 GHz (155x20). Next to that the BIOS is just not at all flexible and designed in a illogical way to make a successful overclock difficult and an uncomfortable process. Often when we'd try to go a little higher or changed a configuration, the board would not even POST anymore resulting in endless CMOS clear resets. It was a downright negative experience.
Now to be fair to Jetway .. this motherboard is not at all targeted at an overclocking audience. So that's where this conclusion needs to move forward to. When you are in the market for a P55 motherboard on which you do not plan to overclock, then the tide turns as really -- this is a nicely designed motherboard with a good feature set and really nice looks. So, other than the two remarks mentioned above, the overall look and feel of the HI05 certainly are good value for money and it left a decent impression.
For every segment of the market there's a product. If you are not willing to spend 200+ USD on a P55 motherboard or don't have the intention of massive overclocking (and paying a premium price for that), then a motherboard like Jetway offers here today certainly could make sense. It's a well thought out motherboard offering just below baseline performance (likely fixed with a BIOS update soon) with the latest Lynnfield based Core i5 and Core i7 processors. As such you receive all the benefits the P55 chipset has to offer, and then a little extra in the form of dual GIGe, Diagnostic POST LED, micro buttons for power on/off/reset/CMOS, nice passive cooling, good design, a lot of PCIe/PCI slots and good audio integration with Optical output which is handy for HTPC usage.
The bottom line: at 125 USD this is a well-tailored motherboard offering a lot of functionality for money with some really charming looks. But if you are looking to tweak and overclock even a little, then you should steer clear of this motherboard.
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