[hardware] Jetway's 915P-TWIN Mobo

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Jetway's 915P-TWIN Mobo: One PC, Two Users

Jetway 915P-TWIN Serves Two Users

New motherboard products keep hitting the market, yet their features do not change that fast, unless there are fundamental platform changes such as Intel's Socket 775 introduction. Usually, motherboard value- added propositions involve adding a new feature while removing one that is obsolete. However, Jetway offers a unique capability: the MagicTWIN mobo allows for two users to work on a single computer simultaneously.

The groundwork was laid by Microsoft WindowsXP, which theoretically makes it possible to log on several users at the same time on a single PC. However, in practice, the capability hasn't worked, even when two monitor and input devices were available. Jetway finally found a way to get around this limitation and calls the new feature MagicTWIN, which is a software add-on. After installing it, two users can log on to two different Windows consoles.

First, you will need a graphics card that comes with two display outputs. Fortunately, this is the case with almost every graphics card today. A second keyboard and mouse can be attached via a PS/2 splitter cable or via USB. Needless to say that MagicTWIN will share all the system resources such as the CPU and graphics processor, optical drives and hard drive capacity. For this reason, the MagicTWIN feature will never be able to replace two full-featured computers, particularly if you have got high performance requirements.

However, running such a twin user system at home or in an office environment may be absolutely sufficient, since today's hardware usually is not pushed to its limits using common office and multimedia applications.

Conclusion

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Getting started with Jetway's 915P-TWIN, including setting up Gigabit LAN, audio, Firewire and the additional mass storage device, was a piece of cake. Our random benchmarks (mainly games and encoding tasks) proved that this board runs within the performance level that one would expect from a 915P solution with dual DDR400 memory. Jetway did its homework pretty well, since we didn't run into any anomalies.

Compared to motherboards from well-known manufacturers, the company would have some trouble distinguishing itself without the MagicTWIN feature, on which Jetway's value-add proposition is largely based. Meanwhile, installing the program is fairly easy, while having two people work with one computer is indeed a nifty application. All you need is a graphics card with two display ports. Although Jetway recommends NVIDIA only, we did not encounter problems running an ATI graphics card.

We see a wide market for the MagicTWIN. In a work environment, one user can surf the Web while another finishes office tasks. Internet cafés and similar institutions can save thousands since they might cut their hardware requirements by up to 50%. Nor does the MagicTWIN feature require much processing power.

With our test system it was easily possible to run a DVD on one console while somebody else was passionately playing Unreal Tournament 2004 on the second one.

Yet we need to exclude one application scenario. It is definitely impossible to have two users playing 3D games with or against each other on one single system. At the end of the day, no commercially-available graphics card can accommodate this application.

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