If you want to plant a little more value with your MagicTwin offering than a bare board (see Mach Speed in next review), consider going with JetWay’s MagicTwin MiniQ barebones SFF systems. Jetway sent over its 860TWIN box for evaluation, which is based on Intel’s 865G chipset. This is the first of three TWIN SFFs from Jetway, the other two being based on the nForce2 and VIA P4M266A. I understand going with VIA for the budget price. I understand nForce2 because of its balance of performance with integrated dual display output. But I think the 865PE would have been a better pick than the 865G because it’s slightly faster and less expensive.
The integrated Intel graphics are wasted because it gets disabled as soon as you add in a compatible dual-head AGP card for the MagicTwin functionality. But this is a small point. You still can’t go wrong with a Springdale system no matter what the flavor.
The 860TWIN is fashioned after the general XPC design. The upper drive cage is fixed rather than removable, but this is OK because the second 3.5” drive bay is in a slide-out carrier that secures in place with a single screw. The 230W power supply is a bit large and protrudes from the back of the chassis. At first, I was disturbed by this, but then I realized that users are going to lose that inch or two of air space anyway because of the power cable.
Following the lead of MSI and Biostar, Jetway uses a copper heatpipe-based heatsink with a side-mounted fan unit that draws air off the northbridge’s passive heatsink, through the CPU heatsink, and out toward the PSU, which then draws up the hot air for removal out the back. The bottom of the chassis is not vented, but there are air grilles on each side panel near the front of the case.
With its silver and acrylic facing, the MiniQ is an attractive machine highlighted by an oval LCD display that displays everything from the time to system component activity to temperatures and fan speed. I like that this display doesn’t garishly overpower the fascia as some other vendors do. Both external drives have swinging doors to conceal them, as do the ports along the bottom (SPDIF-In, mic, stereo out, two 1394, and two USB).
Going with an SFF box for a MagicTwin configuration makes excellent sense since space and power savings are likely to be priorities for interested customers. Jetway sweetens the pot a little further by throwing in a remote control for managing email, Web, video, and music apps on the #1 user station. Like most SFF designs, the 860TWIN sports one AGP and one PCI slot with the AGP positioned near the board’s outer edge. In some cases, I complain about this, but only the highest-end NVIDIA cards require two slots, and this is not the audience that will go in for system resource sharing. Jetway’s MiniQ is a worthy competitor in the SFF space and offers a unique upsell opportunity for a large cross-section of your clients.

Mach Speed
X-Caliber PT800Twin
MSRP: $135
www.machspeed.com

It’s not very often that a new technology and genuinely novel upsell opportunity crosses my desk. And when you get pitched on products as often as I do, it’s easy to become cynical and distrustful. So when I heard that mobo vendor Mach Speed had a new technology that would let two users run Windows simultaneously on two sets of peripherals (mouse, keyboard, monitor, and speakers) from one motherboard, I laughed. And not a happy, my-that’s-a-good-one laugh.
Let’s take the questions in the order in which they popped into my head:
1. Does it work? Yes. Behind me there is a tower running that Mach Speed sent me to showcase their board. On the left set of peripherals, I’m running Soldier of Fortune II. On the right set, I’m watching The Matrix with PowerDVD. One side runs Excel while the other runs Word. There’s only one CPU, one hard drive, and one set of memory. In fact, there’s also only one set of legacy ports. The unit shipped with port splitter pigtails for both PS/2 ports, with the split connectors each labeled 1 and 2 to help users keep their peripheral sets straight. Anyway, the upshot is that it works very well...usually. Keep reading.
2. If this is such a killer idea, why is a relatively small company like Mach Speed beating the likes of ASUS, MSI, and Gigabyte to market with it? Well, it turns out that the actual maker of the motherboard is Jetway, which has much larger manufacturing capabilities. However, Jetway struck a distribution deal with Mach Speed in which Mach Speed is the primary source for bare MagicTwin boards while Jetway is the primary source for the MiniQ SFF boxes. For system builders, this could be advantageous since Mach Speed offers more reseller-friendly services and support – more value for system builders, essentially – while selling boards at the same price as Jetway. But this doesn’t answer the question.
The fact is that Jetway did it first. The technology requires three things: Windows XP, compatible hardware, and the user sharing software. Everybody has access to XP, of course. Jetway exclusively licensed the MagicTwin software and necessary chip to plant on its motherboards from the creator company in Denmark. Could other manufacturers replicate the same thing? Sure, and they doubtless will if Mach Speed/Jetway’s experiment proves successful. But until then, the two companies have a rare window of opportunity not unlike what Shuttle enjoyed with the XPC three years ago.
3. Why would Microsoft settle for one Windows licensing fee when it should be getting two? I asked Mach Speed this, and the answer is simple: Microsoft still applies its licensing to machines, not users. One box, one Windows license. So if this takes off, will Windows change its licensing strategy? That’s a very big, complex question, but also keep in mind that such system sharing is also possible under Linux, and Gates forbid Linux should have a competitive advantage over Windows in the desktop space.
4. Is the board any good? Actually, that’s an odd question to answer. I’m used to judging board quality based on features, component quality, and performance as measured by a standard set of benchmark tests. However, to accurately run benchmarks on a TWIN board requires disabling the MagicTwin software layer and running the system as a conventional single-user box. I could do this, but it violates the purpose of the product and so would yield rather meaningless numbers. (For kicks, I played a DVD on one side while running 3DMark 2003 on the other, and it caused the movie to at least drop frames and often to lock for several seconds at a time. The MagicTwin manual says only to run benchmark tests in single-user mode.)
Let’s talk about features and components, then. In the sample I received, Mach Speed uses VIA’s PT800 Pentium 4 northbridge and the VIA 8237 southbridge. If you fell away from VIA chipsets during the days (years?) of VIA’s legal wranglings with Intel, you should take a fresh look. The PT800, which is based on single-channel memory architecture, performs almost identically to Intel’s i875P (Canterwood) chipset and for substantially less money. You get VIA 10/100 LAN, Realtek 5.1 audio, and two SATA ports with support for RAID 0 and 1. Memory performance goes toe to toe against Intel’s PAT. Really, the only thing missing here is FireWire. There are two empty spots on the PCB marked for 1394, but Mach Speed elected to leave this feature off.
Additionally, there are some caveats with the TWIN platform. When I went to install 3DMark 2003, I learned that the machine only had DirectX 8 installed. Naturally, I downloaded DX9.0b and installed it. Later on, I learned that this only worked through “luck.” Any system changes from Windows modifications to hardware upgrades should be done in single-user mode with MagicTwin disabled. It doesn’t take a genius to envision lots of end-users ignoring this point and calling in with support issues. Times like this are when a hidden partition restore solution such as Phoenix’s FirstWare might come in handy.
I also discovered that if you have two DVD drives installed and attempt to play a movie on each, it will work. PowerDVD lets you specify which drive is your source. However, with two instances of PowerDVD up but only one movie running, I found that the playback often hopped from one side to the other. Then when I started playing the second movie, only one side actually played the video, and both movies were interleaved together. I imagine there may be other application glitches such as this, but they’re likely to be rare.
The fact is that MagicTwin is a hot idea for homes and businesses. Parents want to be nearby when their children are online, right? But there’s that perennial problem of only being able to have one person on the PC at a time. Not anymore. Junior can IM and do homework on the left while Mom or Dad does Quicken and MS Office on the right. Both sides have simultaneous Internet access. (Another cool plus is that you can switch between dual stations using one monitor each and a single-user configuration running dual monitors, just with a driver adjustment.) In offices, the story is the same. If you have two data entry stations next to each other opening from and saving to a network drive, why not run them off the same PC and save the expense of an extra box? You, the system builder, have an immediate competitive price advantage, and even if the aspect of saving $300 or so on a second PC doesn’t grab the employer, the ROI aspects of not having to maintain that second box should.
I found that applications performed perfectly until CPU utilization hit 65% to 70%, and serious problems didn’t set in until around 80% to 90%, which isn’t that different from a standard Windows configuration. Currently, I’m running a 3.0 GHz Pentium 4C with WordPerfect, Outlook, Windows Media Player (playing), and six IE windows all open, never mind the two or three dozen processes running in the background. My CPU utilization is floating between 1% and 6% with an occasional spike to 15% when I do something like skip to the next music track. In short, a modern processor has more than enough overhead to handle two users.
I haven’t spent enough time with MagicTwin to entirely sign off on it, but my initial hours of use look extremely promising. This is the most exciting sales opportunity I’ve seen fall into the channel in a long, long time. Inevitably, there will be right ways and wrong ways to sell this. For starters, labeling the backplane will be a challenge that Mach Speed is apparently leaving to resellers right now. (Which monitor port is for which user? And you better make sure a DVI-to-VGA adapter comes with whatever dual display card you sell with the system.) But smart resellers will find ways to leverage this platform and turn it into a real margin builder.