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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.
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 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...
Mini-ITX.com
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
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?
There is an older dual-nic version, the
VIA EPIA CL-Series. It's only 600mhz but that's lots faster than the old compaq deskpro that i'm currently using for a firewall. I'm planning on upgrading to one of these in this or a similar case.
From what I've read, lots of people are using this motherboard for just this purpose.
...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
1.3Ghz should be enough for anyone but....
The VIA C3 had a rather poor floating point unit, so for apps that need it (e.g. 3D games) they do very badly.
Of course for playing MP3 or WMA files and office apps the older 533MHz (Eden 5000) version was nippy enough :-)
As far as I'm aware they havent improved the FPU yet. Someone let me know if I'm wrong. This armchair CPU designer would of liked to see them throw more silicon at this area.
Simply increasing the clock speed always generates more heat, a more complex FPU would only generate more heat if your making use of the FPU.
Controlling a fans RPM speed with CPU temperature is trivial so this makes a lot of sense.
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
MMX is a set of integer vector operations, SSE is the same for floating point. Neither of these implies 686; Pentium Pro was the first processor with i686 core, and it has neither of these instruction sets.
To complicate matters further, GCC's idea of i686 seems a little different than the official spec (whatever that is). AFAIK, AMD's K6 processors are i686, but programs compiled with gcc for i686 won't run on it. I think it's about the CMOV instruction; please correct me if I'm wrong.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
...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
The FPU is a little better now. It runs at full CPU speed instead of half like the earlier C3's. It's still underpowered though. Sudhian has a review of the last generation MII 12000 here. The 1.2Ghz w/o hardware MPEG4 acceleration can't play 720x540 DIVX file smoothly. If the hardware MPEG4 works, 1.3Ghz should be fast enough for any home theater PC job except video encoding like recording TV. You'll need a TV tuner card with a hardware MPEG encoder.
Right, but I'd prefer the new one as it has SATA on board. It's also a bit faster, more memory bandwidth, etc. I'd be using it to host dynamic content and as a file server as well. When they get a dual NIC version of the new one, I'll be able to build the server I want with no PCI cards, which is what I'd prefer to do. I'm not going to replace my aging system now when I can wait a little bit longer and get a system that does everything I want without any upgrades.
When someone might yell at me, it has to be OpenBSD.
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.
Bah. FUD. Go here to see more info. Also, there is support for the decoder specifically built into MythTV and it works very well.
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.
While it is true that the FPU of the C3 still isn't up to speed with other processors, the C3 1Ghz can definatly play 720x540 MPEG4 back at full speed. I do it all the time with a CVS copy of MPlayer (DirectFB driver) on Slackware Linux. I can even play 720x460 WMV9 (windows binary DLL) with 80% cpu utilization. For comparison, libavcodec decodes 640x480 MPEG4 with only 32% CPU utilization, with 14% going to dealing with the framebuffer (not decoding, just frame copying or vsyncing).
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.)