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Sneak Preview of VIA's next-gen mini-ITX mobo
An anonymous reader writes "VIA will preview its next-generation mini-ITX board for the consumer electronics market at next week's Computex 2004 in Taipei. The EPIA SP features a new graphics and memory controller hub (GMCH) supporting faster front-side bus (FSB), memory, and southbridge interconnect speeds. It also features a C3 processor clocked at 1.3GHz, integrated PadLock Hardware Security Suite, and MPEG-4 acceleration.
Oh, and like the current top-end MII 12000 VIA board, the whole board probably draws under 20watts running flat out."
I have one myself and I love it :)
Hmmm.
Where do you BUY this stuff from? I used to buy those VIA boards from New Egg but then they stopped carrying them. Anyone know why?
I really liked those things!
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
1.3ghz should be enough for anybody.
Froogle is your friend.
Hmmm.
makes my dreams of building KITT that much closer to reality.
That is the Knight Industries Two Thousand
Evolution or ID?
The EPIA-800 ... it is okay I suppose, it does what I'm using it for quite well (KDE on FreeBSD for work purposes, e-mail, light web browsing, SSH, etc). It suffers from being a first-gen product, the chipset is weak, and so on.
A 1.3GHz CN400 based board will be a lot more powerful, and should be more than enough for media applications that these boards are ideally suited for.
The Nano-ITX board that they announced last year still seems to be the coolest thing around in terms of potential for off-the-shelf, single board computer projects.
I mean, it's only 4.7 inches by 4.7 inches! Of course I've never seen a price, but sell this thing in the $100 range and I'll take 3...
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
I thought about getting one of the older ones, and my local place can order them in if you ask... try this with your local store. It's not worth hunting around online for a better price when shipping will eat the advantage many times over. With more expensive parts, it can be worth it but these things are cheap.
I imagine I'll get one when there's dual-NIC version. They're pretty tough to beat for firewalling. There's cheaper and lower power systems in existance, but you usually sacrifice quite a bit.
When someone might yell at me, it has to be OpenBSD.
Windows 3.11 is "old and busted."
Windows 3.2 is the "new hotness."
OMG! Wau!
Interesting, VIA is announcing yet more new products... Yet, I've been looking for the past several weeks (and other posts on the Internet go as far back as Nov of 2003) for VIA's latest generation Athlon XP chipset KT880 via kt880... yet other than VIAs website, it's nowhere to be seen!!!
I've had a clean installation of Win98 on a C3 machine, and it crashes programs occasionally. Getting sound to work on the southbridge (VIA Eden 5000 mobo') is also hard, in Windows. I linux, there's no "neutral" kernel modules for the machine either. It's pissing me off.
I guess they have fixed some problems on this new one though...
Has anyone tried setting up a nice small PVR with any of these? If you put like a Hauppauge 250 or another hardware encoding card in this, is there enough power for recording and watching TV at the same time? How about VIA's graphics? I assume I wouldn't be able to play FarCry... but will it be adequate to display DVDs on a non HDTV?
And you were too stupid to hit Window-L when the Boss came up to talk to you exactly why? Most of the time I feel for guys out of a job- but in your case, the wound is self inflicted.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
the whole board probably draws under 20watts running flat out.
For the ignorant among us, how does that compare to say the power consumed by a 20 watt night light? Is it the same?
...no, it's not Palladium/Trusted Computing etc. Basicly, what it has is an encryption accelerator, just like it has mpeg2, mpeg4 etc. acceleration. Why? Because the processor itself is a whimp.
;). But it might just as well be used to run heavy SSH connections or your encrypted P2P net of choice.
It doesn't do anything else than what a plain 3GHz machine could do. DRM is one *application*, since most DRM'd content is also encrypted
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
its been like 8 months since they were announced but no one seems to have them!!
keanmarine.com
one of these or one of these
NERDS!!!!
unless you need a real compact design, microatx + mobile processor can deliver same low consumption and more power and expansion possibility
look for an Athlon Northwood to undervolt and it will be d*mn cheaper as well
Yes, but would it fit in a 5.25" slot?
Then I could have a beowulf cluser right there in my bigtower case.
I must agree with other posters: the VIA boards are most definitely the shit. And the older ones, like the V-8000A, are a steal. I currently have Fedora Core v1 + XMMS on mine; to make a long story short, lots of fun..
HOWEVER, do note that some VIA processors will advertise themselves as "686-compliant", when in fact their instruction set is missing 1 vital MMX instruction (SSE, I think). So do make sure your binaries are built for the 586. You'll thank me in the morning.
--- The American Way of Life is not a birthright. Hell, it's not even sustainable.
...I really missed DVI or some other HDTV res output. I mean, what I want to use it for is a home theater kind of setup (with network disks, of course)... The Nanode + an LCD TV... now that would be cool.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
...if you're an electrical engineer, no. The motherboard is probably reactive/inductive in some way, not purely resistive like a lightbulb. This means that the phase angle will be non-zero, and the true and apparent power of the circuit will be different.
...if you're talking about your electricity bill, then for all you could care, they're equal. 20W will be extremely close to 20W, regardless of what I said above. Personally I don't care much, since I live a place where most of the year have a space heater on...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Whenever I have looked for a case specifically designed for a Mini-ITX, they have been much higher than mini-tower ATX cases.
I have a few ideas for computer designs, one of which is for a mobile computer. I know you can get just about anything you need for a desktop system but, it there anything available that would allow someone to design and build his own, battery-powered, mobile computer "off-the-shelf"?
Thanks,
A goal is a dream with a deadline
DRM support and control could be _the_ distinctive element between MOBO manufacturers. Most support and performance is similar enough that for good or bad Security/Corporate controls might be the biggest difference between mobo's.
Even radical differences like processor type and mobo size matter less to me than having my own control over my own computer.
ls
Haven't got any mod points- or I would help out on modding.
The point is just about any operating system I know about has something that can be used as a boss key-Window M to minimize everything, Window-L to lock the workstation, even just CTRL-ALT-DEL to bring up the task manager, and that's just the Windows OS. Heck, pop up a full-screen CLI when the boss comes around. Even on a break- what you look at is your business, not your boss's. Never leave anything on screen when the boss comes around- it's always a bad idea EVEN WHEN YOU ARE LOOKING AT SOMETHING WORK RELATED.
Definately a PEBCAK there...you can't blame Taco for your ex-bosses being pricks.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Sadly, if you think there are linux drivers for the MPEG accelerator, I suspect you are ALMOST CERTAINLY going to be disappointed..
:(
Linux drivers for these things are like hens' teeth
David
It is extremely quiet (only audible humming comes from two small fans on the case) which is important to me. It is also very low on energy consumption. I got an APC Back-UPS ES-350 (just a couple of days before the big black-out here, in North-East USA --- could not have been wiser :) The UPS is rated at 8 minutes under 100W load and 2 minutes under 200W but it lasts over 40 minutes powering my server and my DSL modem.
Another thing I am really happy about is the fact that VIA seems to be doing a good job supporting Linux. Personally, I have never had trouble running Red Hat on mine (although, I hear FC2 had issues with it that were only recently fixed --- but that was FC2's problem).
Overall, I feel that this has been a really great product and would wholeheartedly recommend it. I am also very happy to see that VIA has been constantly improving them. I am looking forward to seeing the upcoming nano-ITX boards.
This sounds interesting. Possibly handling the motion vectors and a deblocking filter in hardware. I wonder if this is the extent of the 'MPEG-4' support, or if that refers to a separate MPEG-4 hardware decdoder. Regardless, the motion comp and deblocking should also be applicable to most other non-wavelet based codecs. Although that won't matter a bit unless they publish the specs so we can use it.
I also wonder if 'all HDTV formats' means the card can handle interlacing. I've been trying to drive a 1080i only HDTV lately and had a heck of a time finding a card that would drive it out the DVI. The only ones I found were the Matrox G550 and the Radeon AiW 9800(component, haven't tried DVI).
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
Via was started in California, then moved to Taiwan, the notebook computer business HQ. Why hasn't any American (or Japanese, or German...) company threatened the Taiwanese lock on design leadership? Taiwan's economics might offer a longterm manufacturing edge in this industry, but what kind of competitive advantage do Taiwanese companies have in the innovation?
--
make install -not war
I've got a nice VIA Epia board (C3 Nehemiah). :) If you don't use a recent gcc compile with i586 instead - Mine supports MMX+SSE (it has two SSE pipes).
The instruction in question is CMOV.
To build for these machines with recent GCCs build with c3 as -march or -mcpu
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
As much as I dislike Via, I gotta admit that these mini boards are a home run -- the best thing to happen to PCs in a long time. I'm looking forward to Intel and/or AMD jumping on the bandwagon. And soon after that I hope to see even smaller stuff becoming popular, possibly even system-on-chip designs. How sweet would that be? Yeah, I know you can buy a single-chip system now, but I want one that's just (or almost) as powerful as my home PC. Integrated graphics, gigs of RAM, all running at several GHz. Forget laptops... put the whole thing in a PDA. :)
XP/2003 Window L locks the workstation.
Substitute for your favorite hotkey that clears the screen in whatever OS you're using.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Bah. FUD. Go here to see more info. Also, there is support for the decoder specifically built into MythTV and it works very well.
But better power supplies don't simply use a cheap diode/cap bulk supply anymore because this puts a HUGE load on the AC line - especially when it's first turned on and that fat cap has to charge up. This capacitive load also causes non-ideal power factor alignment the entire time the system is on, which means your effective energy consumption (what it reads at the meter) may not actually reflect actual use in the system. Rsistive (neutral) to slightly inductive loads are generally favored by the power company and their meter equipment, and there are real benefits to optimizing power factor of euqipment (especially if you're in an office or hosting location with hundreds or thousands of computers). So, most of the better PC power supplies for PCs employ PFC, or power factor correction. Still, not all of them do.. it's something worth watching in the specifications when shopping for a supply (or a CRT monitor) for a new system.
there are benchmarks all over, google for "via epia review" and you are sure to get some good ones. Anecdotally, they are plenty fast for basically everything but 3d games, multimedia creation, and viewing very highly compressed (mpeg4, high bitrate divx) video. This new board will hopefully change that. I've used one (an 800 mhz) as a desktop machine for a co-worker, and the only thing they commented on was how quiet and little it was compared to their old (p4) machine. They made no mention of a performance hit, and they work on the thing all day long. I've also used one (1 Ghz) as a firewall / server for my dad's business. And frankly, the poor thing is bored.
Flash works fine, even those silly animated shorts and games. Remember that a "slow as balls" computer by todays standards will likely meet their (your parents) needs just fine. The biggest benefit over a cheap athlon is that these can be made small and quiet, making them unobstrusive. They also run cool enough that they don't affect the temperature of the room they are in noticably, unlike athlons / P4 which in a lot of ways are very expensive space heaters....
I have two of the EPIA 533 fanless machines. One is my mail/web server for the internet, the other is my NFS/web server for my home use. These things are awesome at only a measured 32W power consumption with everything running (hard drive included). This 32W is using old 3.5 inch hard drives and a case fan. I expect to have done better if I went with the 2.5 inch lower power hard drives and external power supply.
But what I find really amazing about all of this is that I got these little low power boxes and they are doing as much as many people dedicate on a 140W+ machine. There's really no need for that. If you find 533MHz too slow, then move up to a higher machine. But I was going for the silent/fanless models.
I can't claim to have the fastest set up in the world, but for 99.9% of you with a home mail/web server, you really don't need to run it on that big of a box. And for 32W of power, it makes for a cool summer.
In time, I think people will realize that the benefit of having a 3.2GHz mail server isn't that great. Sure, there might be exceptions and I might not survive a slashdot effect, but not many of us will.
I agree, they're fast enough for most tasks. As an experiment I moved all my work to a VIA Epia 533 Fanless motherboard (with 1 GB of RAM, which helps a lot) for three months. This is the slowest motherboard VIA sells, and I think the slowest on the market that's still in active sales as opposed to used/inventory sales. I ran both XP and Slackware 9 on the box.
CPU loading was idle most of the time. It was acceptable for email, web browsing, and word processing. There were a few places it bogged down: recalculating large spreadsheets, websites with Flash animated ads, printing, displaying PDFs (ghostview pretty much choked the system whenever it would run) and running compression (gzip tar backups would max out the load instantly.)
I upgraded to a fanless Pentium M ITX box because I could, but still use the VIAs for web/mail service, which work fine -- one box's uptime reached 240+ days before I needed to take it down for hardware maintenance.
They're not gaming systems or workstations, but otherwise completely acceptable for most uses -- and the fanless ones are pretty much silent (the loudest thing the VIA 533 PC was the hard disk seeking. Really.)
That article only reinforces Kjella's point: The VIA C3 has a crypto accelerator, which is neutral when it comes to DRM.
Mini-ITX is nice, but I think VIA needs to come out with something that can compete with other Mini-ITX vendors using Pentium4, Pentium-M or Athlon.
For those who do not follow the link, a library to use the mpeg decoder is available as a binary only file for certain distributions. Some may find this acceptable, others may not. If you are considering purchasing one, you need to make your own decision on what you consider acceptable.
Perhaps this time they will release fully functional drivers for their MPEG4 hardware acceleration chip...
have you seen some of those u1 sized cases, that are just wider that host 27 Via EPIA machines?... thats 27Ghz each, each board (with cpu built in) being as cheap as $250 when you buy dozens and fits in any u1 rack.
Here is a video http://www.via.com.tw/en/Products/movie/blade.wmv
This is 27ghz, available passively cooled as well and take up about the same size as 3 u1 machines... so even if you get dual AMD 64 machines, each CPU being 2.2 ghz, you still get 8.8ghz in the same size, total power consumption as high as 900 watts....
and in cluster usage, it will be slower than 9 epia machines each with their own ram, bus, doing number crunching and spreading the load. Now the for 9ghz, those epia machines will only take around 200 watts even with each having a separate bus, separate ram, etc...
I'm no expert and its a bit late, so I may have not explained my views properly, but am I the only 1 to see the potential in this?
---- I mean hell, passively cooled, fast machines... I have a 1ghz epia that I use as my primary desktop, and it gives me everything I want. Doesn't play latest games, but I'm sure it can if you make use of the onboard pci slot.
I compile 3 things, do some gimping, browse the net and watch a movie at the same time (got to love ion), without the movie slowing down.
Is that decode only or encode/decode? I mean, is this Tivo/encoding farm material, or just another mildly interesting but ultimately impractical fad gadget?
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
I'm pretty sure that VIA is the *only* mini-itx vendor. Other motherboard manufacturers build smaller-than-ATX forms (micro-atx, flex-atx), I don't think anyone has built a Pentium or Athlon board in the same size.
Look at the tomato! Isn't it sad? He can't dance! Poor tomato!
They're cool little machines, but we need to be putting more pressure on ALL these hardware companies to document their shit. Providing comprehensive documentation on the use of the hardwaer they spent so many man-years developing doesn't protect them from their competitors at all - it jsut lowers the value of their product. In this case, no matter how small it ain't worth it - I can get a (well supported linux compatible) matx card that's nearly as small and it will let me choose the cpu - including an underclocked athlon that would still smoke that underpowered C3.
Epia PD Specs:
:))
Damn.. didn't see this thing before, it's damn great for building a nice firewall.
It will even fit in my Raq2 case (damn MIPS
Crivens! I kicked meself in me own heid!
Washing off crud from the manufacturing process, IIRC with lovely volatile solvents.
Mod this guy up...that's cooler than the article itself!
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
(Editor's note: The source code is available to large OEM customers under NDA/licensing agreements. It is not available to end-users.)
This is what I'm talking about. Linux users do NO ONE any favors when they adopt this sort of crap. Via is not the only maker of small motherboards. When they stop treating linux users like sewcond class citizens I'll happily go looking here - until then Via will get not one penny of my money. Not for one of these mini systems nor for any other motherboard or peripheral.
Vote with your dollars. And be vocal about it.
No, it isn't, at least energy wise.
Problem No. 1: The VRM (voltage regulator module).
Efficiency is low.
Problem No. 2: The power supply unit.
Efficiency is low. Especially if you have a 300 watt unit and a computer that only uses say 60 watts.
German computer magazine c't has measured such a setup. I don't have the article handy, so I quote from memory.
If you reduce the power consumption of your CPU by 40 watts, less than 20 watts will be saved due to the loss of the PSU and the VRM.
So if you really want to build a low consumption PC, be sure you have a board that is desgned for this and a PSU that is designed for this.
I wouldn't be that suprised if a Mini-ITX board with a 15 watt CPU and components uses 40 watts less than a normal PC with an ATX board and the same CPU running with a 300 watt PSU.
(Yes, i was suprised by this article too as a run a undervolted Mobile Athlon in my board, but I never measured the power consumption myself).
Bye egghat.
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel
Like, to install a nic and copy the game to a computer that can play it? You need AGP graphics for the latest games, not PCI :-P
I feel for you, but you lost my support when you "set my threshold to -1". That's where you went wrong, buddy.
for your information it comes with 2 onboard nics, and newer boards come with 1gbit nics built in.
not on 98, it doesn't. Ctrl-Esc brings up the Start menu. Hitting a letter after that will either select a program or do nothing (if you don't have a selection that starts with that letter)
This is what I'm talking about. Linux users do NO ONE any favors when they adopt this sort of crap. Via is not the only maker of small motherboards. When they stop treating linux users like sewcond class citizens I'll happily go looking here - until then Via will get not one penny of my money. Not for one of these mini systems nor for any other motherboard or peripheral.
How are linux users being treated second class? What they are providing is very comparable to what they are providing under Windows: a binary library for supported other pieces of software. That's what the Windows users are getting. Demanding source code is asking for special treatment. I think it's commendable that they are supporting Linux as much as they are. Sure they could do better, but this is a step in the right direction. Not supporting a company like this is counterproductive if you want better Linux hardware support. When a company takes a risk and offers some support support for a non-mainstream system, they will likely continue to offer that level of support, or even expand it, if their initial experiment works out well. If it fails, they will bag it altogether. What would you rather have: partial support that lets you use the hardware, even if it's imperfect, or no support at all? Expecting a company to drop everything and bend over backwards for a market segment that is not neccesarily part of their core target, and is small, even if it is growing, is naive. They are trying to make money afterall. But even this is secondary to the real point:
Vote with your dollars. And be vocal about it.
Exactly. Vote with your dollars and support companies that provide Linux support, even if it's imperfect. Then say, "Hey, you know, I bought your product because I can use it with Linux, and I really like it. You know what would make it even better? If you would make an effort to support all of it's features in Linux, or release a spec or some driver source, so someone else in community can make full support happen. That would probably get you even more customers. I know I would be telling all my friends to buy your stuff, even the ones who use Windows, because then if they want to switch to Linux, it will be easier for them." Once a company hears that enough times, they will be more likely to provide improved support or release code. If they make a guesture to the community by providing partial support, and all they get back is, "Fah! That's not good enough!! You must release code or provide full support before we will buy!!!" they will just tell us all to bugger off and focus only on their core markets, while we sit out in the cold wishing we had even just a binary driver for our hardware MPEG decoders so we could watch our movies on our little set-top boxes...
Get real man. Face the fact that as desktop Linux users, we are the equivalents of Internet age Hippies. We are a fringe group, but we've got some damn good ideas that will change the world. Everyone else just needs to catch up, and we need to have the patience to let them. Otherwise, things are not likely to work out the way we want them to.
Good point. What I should have demanded in that post is not source code, but documentation. And if you think windows users don't have that either, well, good point again - but again I'll point out that the PC became what it did because it was well documented. If I just want proprietary hardware that "just works" and I don't give a shit how it does it or how well it's supported I'll buy a mac and be done with it.
IOW I gave up ATI some time ago and don't look back. Looking forward I don't see any Via parts in my future either - if that means limiting myself to intel, amd or sis motherboards and graphics that's damn skippy with me - the system I have now plays high rez video just fine with a humble 1600xp cpu and if I want or need a feature added I can hack away at the driver (or pay someone else) until I get it.
This is a trait that, aside from Ati, seems to be almost uniquely asian. If I want to work with some great uber intel or amd or motorola chip all I need do is contact the maker and request info. Aside from patented and trademarked stuff like dolby dsp source code they really don't give a shit who I am nor will they demand to see my wallet before accomodating them. Intel of late seems to be going back to that very arrogant model they adopted in the eighties and now are apparently witholding info on certain features of their cpu chips in regard to wireless networking - so perhaps I should even leave them out of this commentary (or mroe accurately, put them aside with via and the rest)
What would you rather have: partial support that lets you use the hardware, even if it's imperfect, or no support at all? Hardware with no documentation is, essentially, no support at all. A pos driver that works with "some systems" (and most often not very well) is NOT an acceptable solution - not to me and not to most any home user who wants a computer that just works.
If you want to reward a company with your business it should be the ones who provide accurate documentation on their chips that will allow others to make use of them and the community to support them. To buy into any other system is to accept a "license" on hardware itself - if that's your game you might as well just stick with windows or go get a mac because it's all the same. If linux continues to grow as it has makers like via et all will simply have no choice then but to catch up.. but giving them money now sets the very bad precedent of telling them "ok, here's the vaseline.. have at it, skippy."
No thanks. I'll keep my money and my vaseline.
Which i read, however the poster was alluding to being able to use a PCI slot to connect a graphics card good enough to play modern games, which is impossible, as AGP is required for modern games.
Quick google search returns: http://uk.special.reserve.co.uk/q_GG3398_xfx_gefor ce_fx_520.html
And I have talked to people successfuly playing UT2004 on lowest resolution at good FPS using a very cheap PCI graphics card.
Its also more than enough for all strategy games, quake3, enemy territory, and best games out there infact.
I havent updated my graphics card personally for over 3 years, and it still plays all the latest games at high resolution (I have gforce3 ti200, plays UT2004 on 1280x1024 at 40FPS), so I will bet you anything you can use this fanless god to play just about anything, even though that isnt its purpose.
oh, and look jackass: http://www.dabs.com/uk/Search2/Product+Details.htm ?quicklinx=3445&searchphrase=Quadro%20FX600
a high-end graphics card for PCI, 256Mb onboard memory, 3840 x 2400 resolution, 400 MHz ram clock speed, and great benchmarks all over the internet.
Koodos to the fanless, mobile future :)
All tied up with a nice little PCI bus to really grate that FPS. It's not exactly future-proof. Once games start requiring >256mb for their uncompressed textures, that card is going to run like a dog. That's why people don't buy PCI graphics adapters any more.
Well, PCI Extended is comming out since AGP is showing its aging, so that will replace it, and its backwards compatible with the older PCI. So PCI has theoretically a longer predicted life spam than AGP. Also, seems PCI Extended is 32bit compatible (or is it not?), so it whould be seen in mini-itx machines.