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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.
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.
Mini-ITX.com
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Forget mini-itx, I want to know when Nano-ITX will be availible... I get the distinct feeling that it's a vaporvare promo trick... it's only 2/3 of the size of the mini-itx boards and 10x as useful/easy to put into things.... I want one :(
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!!!
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?
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
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
Since I'm using an ATI TV Wonder VE in my current mini-itx Toolbox PVR (built into a $5.99 K-MART Toolbox), I decided to run Win2000 on it.
I had NO PROBLEMS with getting the hardware to work. None. All the VIA stuff loaded and ran perfectly.
Since I've committed the Sin of admitting M$ use, I will go so far as to admit records the season finale of Enterprise on it last night...
...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
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.
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. :)
try www.idot.com
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.)