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VIA Epia SP 13000 Review
Nehemiah writes "Epiacenter.com just published a review on the brand-new VIA Epia SP 13000 mini-itx mainboard.
It's the first VIA Epia board with the CN400 chipset and, together with the new epiOS Linux distribution that is announced in the review, it seems to have a very good performance during MPEG2/MPEG4 playback."
on the net... here's some links to the article.
Nehemiah writes "Epiacenter.com just published a review on the brandnewVIA Epia SP 13000 mini-itx mainboard.
It's the first VIA Epia board with the CN400 chipset and together with the new epiOS Linux distribution that is announced in the review, it seems to have a very good performance during MPEG2/MPEG4 playback."
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Coincidentally, I just surfed eBay for Mini-ITX boards today. It looks like 533 MHz CPUs are still, after a year or more, the fastest ones available on fanless systems. WTF? Why aren't we seeing 1 GHz+ fanless systems in the Mini-ITX form factor?
A small quiet machine will most often be used as a media-computer, something to play DVD, MP3's etc etc.. Thats why. These arent going to be the killer gaming rig that conquers all.
Starsucks
Well, since one of the major uses of mini-itx boxes is for homebrew PVR solutions, it's pretty reasonable for them to provide that benchmark. I doubt anyone would recommend an EPIA for number crunching.
Linux for everything remember?
EPIA boards have always been a little more tricky then other boards to get linux running on it. the boards are all VIA components. being new and in a really small market it was only time before the resources were pulled together in an OS for the mini-itx platform.
No way man, we must KEEP The PS/2 keyboard port... Where else are you going to plug in your vintage IBM Model M clicky-keyboard?
Not available in USB!
-Z
Because the VIA boards have hardware assisted decoding of MPEG2/MPEG4, as well as hardware AES.
It is a strong selling point for these boards and one of their main draws.
-Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Because people still use those ports. Until the rest of the world throws away all their PS/2 keyboards and mice, and their UPS, RAID box, etc. with RS-232 serial port, these ports are going to keep appearing on motherboards. Would you believe there are still people using ISA cards? ISA cards! Oh, the horror..
There are also some "positive" things that come out of the VIA -- Like the CLE266 being one of the best-supported video cards by the DirectFB project. That said, I'm actually very, very happy that there are places like the EPIA Wiki to walk you through how to get all of this stuff working on your own distribution instead of being railroaded into using VIA's. Mine runs Freevo on Gentoo, which suits me just peachy.
I'm sure VIA just baked everyone else's Linux patches into a single distribution to roll out with their hardware -- Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course -- But I would undoubtedly have preferred VIA to have spent more time contributing to the success of existing, frequently-used projects (similar to how they did for Xine to get it to run with their mpeg4 acceleration, I guess, although preferrably in a more package-neutral manner) for their hardware than building their own distribution on the backs of all of the fine folks that have worked so hard to make these adorable little boxes go.
Quick correction Re: Mac Mini and memory upgrade. Opening the case does not void the warranty. Also, installing memory does not void the warranty if you use an Apple approved memory part.
I'm in agreement overall with your assesment, if you are comparing the mini with a general purpose computer. On the other hand, I think the mini should be viewed primarily as no more than a particularly powerful console box.
I honestly wonder what would happen if
"Don't worry about the problems you have in mathematics, I assure you mine are much greater." - Einstein c.1919
This information is a little out of date and only what I picked up while setting up a Mini-ITX MythTV box (I'm not involved in the EPIA development) so there may be inaccuracies, but is mostly correct for the most part.
The driver situation for the EPIA boards has been less than desirable. The VIA engineers were very supportive of linux and wrote drivers for all the chipsets on their boards, including accelerated XFree86 drivers, video out, hardware video encoding, etc. They were even cool enough to release the source to everything the were allowed to (some stuff was restricted because of third parties). But they did a poor job of keeping the binary driver packages up-to-date, and couldn't seem to decide which distros they were going to support, so you had the situation where this driver was packaged for these three distros, and that driver was packed for these other 4 distros.
Eventually, some people got frustrated and forked the code, vastly improving it - this is the Unichrome project. But they also considered it to be in development, and so only made the source available. And there was still the hassle of dealing with the few closed source drivers. The best distro by far for EPIA became gentoo, probably because it was easier to maintain and use an up-to-date source package than a binary one, and most of the EPIA community gravitated over there.
I don't know why the other distos didn't include unichrome drivers - perhaps they were just waiting for them to stop being beta. (Some may include them now, it has been at least 6 months since I checked). Anyway this appears to be a simple gentoo live-CD with the drivers in question. And that kicks ass. An OS that works out of the box will save newbies all sorts of time - I spent a couple weekends just figuring out where to find the newest versions of all the various drivers. And it really isn't a whole new distro - it is just a live-CD of existing distro. Considering how easy people have made it to roll your own live-CD, it makes a heck of a lot of sense for somone to do this.
I've built four fanless VIA boxes - not Mini-ITX, though.
I got VIA 866 MHz cpus, topped 'em with a respectable sized heatsink (with fans) on a full size 370 motherboard, mounted each in mid-size tower case with a seagate barracuda 80 gig drive and a 150 Watt power supply. Now assuming that the CPU might get enough cooling from convective air flow in the case, and that the power supply would never be taxed (at full speed, the system draws maybe 30 Watts), I wired in a switch to cut off the cpu and power-supply fans if so desired.
Once built, I ran some screensavers that pushed the cpu to 100% usage for eight hours (using slackware bootable cd) with no fans whatsoever. All the boxes survived without problems.
Since building them (2-3 years ago now), I eventually used one as a firewall/router - running openBSD. That one suffered a cpu/motherboard burnout after ~4 months of running 24/7 fanless. I dropped the hard-drive in a sibling, and left the fans running - up for ~6 months now without incident.
Another is currently being used to do audio recording with a Demudi install. Having burned out one of the boxes, I am more cautious, running the fans except when recording with microphones. With the fans off and ~6 feet between the box and the microphones, thermal noise from the pre-amps and electromagnetic noise from the radar station on the mountain is louder than the noise from the spinning barracuda.
The 866 MHz VIA is fast enough to handle about 12-14 raw tracks in ardour before running out of cycles (without extra effects). I plan to do final mixing and mastering on a faster dual-pentium box once all the raw tracking has been done.
This may not be adequate for a living-room media center, but it works for me as an audio workstation. I thought others might want to know about it.
I admit - I love the Model M. I've only had to replace one so far. I intend to keep using one as long as is technologically possible.
It's more than just a keyboard, it's a weapon of self defense!
Sometimes my arms bend back.
www.mini-box.com has some awesome fanless PSU options, actually.
I created a mythtv box from an EPIA MII12000 (1.2GHz). I put it into a georgeous Silverstone LC06 case. I switched the fans with silent ones, chose silent optical/HD drives. The end result is just awesome. In fact the 12000 is way overpowered for what I am doing - thanks to onboard encoding in the Hauppauge PVR card I use, and decoding in the EPIA motherboard - and the CPU sits at 10% most of the time. The 800MHz CPU would have been a better pick, and then I would have had less heat = 1 less and slower fans.
Thats the good side...
Behind the scenes there were months of trying to debug random crashes. There is a known issue in the DMA on the MII12000 and others. VIA have refused (scroll to bottom) to respond, even on bulletin boards where they often frequent. They know about the problem because they have fixed in windows driver updates released late last year.
There was a happy ending, for me anyway. If I rebuilt the kernel with CPUFREQ off and only i386 code (a real pain with Fedora Core 3 because it defaults to i686) then everything seems stable.
But I have serious reservations about their support for linux, and would have reservations about dealing with them again.
http://www.hushtechnologies.net/ has lots to choose from with no fans. I would have paid the price premium a couple years ago if I'd known how noisy my Shuttle would be.
"The current favorite platforms are VIA EPIA, EPIA-M..."
http://www.linuxbios.org/news/
Careful. The drive in the mini is not rated for continuous use. It's a notebook drive, so you should run it as little as possible. (It's rated for many sleep/wake cycles, but not continuous use).
here's a quick hint for you: don't offer 'facts' if you can't check out your facts first before blathering on.
about Apple's warranty:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=30
and http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25
of course, that doesn't mean they _want_ you to do it; the case is difficult to open but it can be done if you're patient and careful: http://www.russellbeattie.com/notebook/1008276.ht
[rant] it's NOT just about looks: the mini target audience is for "adders" and "switchers" who want a computer that just works, i.e. they want their software to work - iPhoto, iTunes, iMovie, iDVD, GarageBand, Safari/Mozilla, as opposed to learning how to be a systems admin to care for their Windows computer. sure you can get a PC for less, but then you still have to buy XP and all the other software. and it's still XP. They're buying the whole ball of wax for the "computing experience", a consistent, friendly, useful experience, so your statement, "...most of the software that most people want to run out there runs either on Linux..." is crap, since there's no decent equivalent to the iLife suite in Linux(or Windows, provide links if you can.) and due to the nature of Open Source, there will be differences(some significant) in UI for linux apps.
don't forget, all macs COME WITH iLife - you don't have to buy it, install it and learn five different ways to do the same thing(i'm thinking of the OS file browser provided to all apps and navigating directories in Explorer)...
you do non-technical readers/users a disservice by not providing proof of your statements - and your lack of experience with the Mac shows. the mac "experience" is something you realize when the computer and the software don't get in the way of what you're doing. i've got a dual-boot windowsXP/gentoo machine i built myself and several Macs. I've been using, programming, designing and destroying software professionally since 1985; i've used punch cards, TTYs, mainframes, supercomputers, PCs, i've designed my own user interfaces when there wasn't even X/OpenGL(remember the Sun1? the DEC Gigi? character graphics on a vt100? i do.) - so i have a lot of choices, my opinion? the user experience in windows is abysmal(sp?) when compared to the mac, so i'll take the mac every time. when you can get a complete, consistent set of programs that do what is included in iLife for Linux/FOSS, it _will_ be a great day indeed. until then you're saddled with inconsistent applications user-interfaces for both linux and windows. ( p.s. i like MythTV, Gimp(especially with the recent UI hacks...), blender, firefox/thunderbird and use fluxbox, but they're just short of the integration achieved on the mac.)[/rant]
here's a review of the mini that i feel is fair and balanced:
http://www.sfftech.com/showdocs.cfm?aid=659
to sum up the mini-memory issue: there are _many_ reviews elsewhere and it has been discussed at length in many forums that you can install your own memory, it's just if you break the lid doing it they won't replace it.
back on-topic: the EPIA series are able performers if you're not a demanding user(the dual cpu board displayed at Cebit looks promising); OK, yet another flavor of linux, why?.
a great place for EPIA info is: URL:http://mini-itx.com//
"...that's as white as it gets; all the bits are on..."
Most old IBMs Model M had some problems with the serial cable signals - namely, the signals are supposed to idle at +5VDC and be "pulled down" by either end (computer or keyboard), yet they float at a lower voltage. This generates problems with some keyboard adapters and motherboards.
It can be fixed easily with a couple of pull-up resistors on both data lines. The site also mentions some motherboards & USB adapters that work fine without the mod.
I'm using FreeBSD 5.X on an old EPIA 5000 board with VIA VT6102 Rhine II chipset and the vr driver. Yes, I get sometimes vr0: rx packet lost messages on the console. This was only a problem for me while using NFS in UDP mode (I'm running diskless, so NFS reliability is pretty important!). Switching to TCP NFS solved all problems for me. The problem is not so bad as it sounds.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.