J&W?

Hades

Hades

Hades

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I've not really come across this manufacturer before (although I do realise now that some of the OcUK value range have been J&W). How good are they in comparison to the main players?
 
In a quite frightening number of cases, they are the main players. I had some test boards from them last year and I had a lot of in-depth conversations about their 'branded' boards vs. the competition and in at least one case, they were also making the competitor that everyone was raving about;)

I was specifically asked not to say who they make motherboards for, but OcUK and their competitors are selling J&W made motherboards at the moment.

They also make a huge number of graphics cards.
 
erm I heard they put the likes of asus to shame, I was going to get a J&w X48 (that thing looked stunning) a few members had got the board and was inpressed by it, but it was too late as i had the rampage.
 
I woudnt of been surprised if they manufactured Abit motherboards a while back, as Abit had sold their production facility & were using another company to oem.

It's definitly not Gigabyte anyway, theirs loads of pics, clips of their production factory on the web.

Point of View, Zotac, maybe Evga but I thought Foxconn manufactuered their boards.

On the J&W website theirs a statement on their regarding FAKE DFI motherboards that were originally aquired from J&W by a 3rd party lol.
 
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That's all interesting info. How are they for BIOS support, etc?

EDIT: Also, let's pick an example. Which of the following boards wold be better:

Asus P5Q Pro Turbo
J&W JW-P45D2-ULTRA

They look very evenly matched.
 
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They are primarily OEM manufacturers, so you get the BIOS support through the manufacturer rather than from J&W, but you can see from the BIOS update dates that they are supporting the motherboards.

I'm not sure if you remember the initial OcUK/J&W motherboard, the IP35-Pro?

I bought one because I was convinced it would be rubbish and it was. Then I started getting e-mails from China asking for further information and they wrote two BIOS updates based on testing I was doing. From being a complete mongrel, they make it into a pedigree. The actual construction of the board was fabulous, they just hadn't done a lot of work on the BIOS, which they had bought in from Intel with the chipset.

While I'm not saying they are perfect, they are much more responsive that any of the big-name brands to a personal e-mail. I think OcUK missed a trick by trying to get premium prices for an unknown brand. If the X48 board had been £100 at launch, which is what I believe J&W suggested, it would have been a smash. Unfortunately, it was priced at £165, which was a direct competitor to all the other X48 boards and it didn't really stand a chance.

As a result, J&W never launched their X58 board in the UK, although it is sold as a branded board in the UK by OcUK competitors. It is also a good board though, but it needed a couple of BIOS updates;)
 
Hades said:
EDIT: Also, let's pick an example. Which of the following boards wold be better:

Asus P5Q Pro Turbo
J&W JW-P45D2-ULTRA

They look very evenly matched.
Click to expand...

I think you need to take price into account. If the two were identically specified, but one was half the price, which would you buy?

In Hong Kong, that's the position at the moment. But when they get to the UK for some reason, all the pricing advantage is taken away. And you can understand why. Say you were a big compnent reseller and you wanted to sell ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, BFG, XFX etc. and you went to China and bought a container-load of cheap, but extremely good, motherboards then you become a competitor to ASUS and Gigabyte, or if you bought in cheap OcUK graphics cards then BFG and XFX wouldn't like it. You would be crashing the market because they would have to cut their highly inflated UK prices to compete.

They would then stop you having the best boards on launch day, your shipment of graphics cards might not turn up when they said it would etc.

And that's what I think happened with OcUK value motherboards to be honest.

Anyway - to answer your question;

Asus P5Q Pro Turbo at £100
J&W JW-P45D2-ULTRA at £60

I'd take the J&W thanks, and I suspect so would everyone else if it clocked (and it does;))
 
Again, very useful. Thankyou.

The price is (currently) almost identical. But that's because the Asus is on TWO. Otherwise the J&W would be a little cheaper. But the J&W would also fetch less when selling again so overall it probably doesn't make much difference longer term.

The J&W has a slightly better layout (90 degree SATA ports for example) although you do have to question whether there would be the same level of support in the future.

However, I would probably be inclined to go with the J&W - I've never quite got on 100% with the Gigabytes, Abits, Asus and MSI that I've had. The last board that I absolutely loved and felt 'just right' was an Epox 8RGA+ back in Athlon XP days. That was a great board and overclocked like a nutter. I'm not sure why people didn't rate Epox higher.
 
Hades said:
I'm not sure why people didn't rate Epox higher.
Click to expand...

Agreed. If I recall correctly they were owned by Chaintech and they had a high-ish failure rate at one point. I think they just withdrew from the market after that.
 
they went bust & many of the staff surfaced at a company called Supox making mobos that looked surprisingly like Epox designs ...
 
Regarding their actual boards, they are not bad at all.

Having owned a IP35-Pro and the JW-P45D2-ULTRA I can confirm these baords are not bad at all. The IP35 was great at overclocking dual core chips, but not so good at quad core. I contacted J&W as I was having an issue clocking my new Quad Core CPU - so they kindly offered to send me a P45 Ultra board for free :) (refurb) and that board is happy clocking my Q9550 :)
 
I got recommanded the J&W X48 but I already had my rampage on the way :(

tbh I think i should have got the j&w
 
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