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."

Comments

Mirror, mirror...

[winkydink]

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."

Re:Mirror, mirror...

[standbypowerguy]

What point is there in mirroring only the first page of a six page article?

Re:Mirror, mirror...

[compm375]

He probably figured that no one would notice, since they don't RTFA anyways...

Re:Mirror, mirror...

[winkydink]

Suggestions on how to automate that process would be much appreciated.

Re:Mirror, mirror...

[Anonymous Coward]

wget www.example.com -r

Automatic enough?

Re:Mirror, mirror...

[winkydink]

A little too automatic. Try it.

Slashvertisment

[darth_MALL]

Can you advertise My website? Sellout.com?
This place gets lamer by the day. You are buying your way to having no friends. Have fun.

#$@#$ fans

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:#$@#$ fans

[Jozer99]

That is because the chip design hasn't changed much at all between the 533 and the 1300. In order to clock it higher with the same design and manufacturing techniques, the processor needs more power, and therefore leaks more as heat.

Re:#$@#$ fans

[newbie65536]

The VIA EPIA MS10000 Fanless is the 1 GHz fanless board that is available at mini-box.com. These have acutally been available for quite some time. Guess you haven't looked too hard for it.

Re:#$@#$ fans

[fishbowl]

>Why aren't we seeing 1 GHz+ fanless systems in the
>Mini-ITX form factor?

That's a very good question. I've been on a quest for some years now, for a system that can be mounted in a shallow 19" rack form factor, that has no fan whatsoever but enough power to run audio applications. I can't even find good compromises, although I make do with my Antec Sonata, Zalman coolers, etc.

Shuttles are *way* too noisy, which was upsetting because they were recommended to me on the basis of them being very quiet, so I bought one, yuck.

Dell desktop machines are surprisingly quiet, I've discovered.

The Antec Sonata case is still not quiet enough to be called "silent" but it's pretty good. The hardest part of putting my system together has been finding a fanless 1.5v AGP video card. ASUS PxPN00 boards have no fan on the bridge chip, which is nice. Seagate SATA drives with the SNXXXX model numbers are pretty quiet, especially in the Antec case.

But as far as Mini-ITX, except for the 533 C3 boards, they all have fans.

Re:#$@#$ fans

[Anonymous Coward]

It's too bad Mac Minis make horrible PVRs, because they're pretty quiet.

Re:#$@#$ fans

[prockcore]

epia800 is fanless, and some Epia1000s are fanless.

You can also get a fanless 30W PSU for both. 30W is enough to drive the motherboard, the cpu, and a harddrive.

Re:#$@#$ fans

[Jeff DeMaagd]

How does one tell what voltage an AGP card is? What do you expect of the AGP card in terms of speed? Radeon 9200 cards seem to be available in fanless form. I have an ATI branded 9500 which has a fan that is practically inaudible, to me at least.

I do agree Shuttles are pretty noisy. They went to the trouble to using a heat pipe system and then attach a noisy fan to the exhaust end of the heat pipe and call it "quiet", while I can easily hear it ten feet away.

I think the Mac mini is pretty quiet, maybe not quiet enough for audio use though.

Maybe your next best bet is to assemble a hush box to put a computer into.

Re:#$@#$ fans

[Anonymous Coward]

Translation:

Tripped over my own ass, I just surfed -cowabunga dudes!- eBay for Mini-ITX boards today. Do my eyes deceive me, but like woah the 533MHz CPUs after like ages dude are still totally the fastest airblower systems on the fence. WTF is this shit? Where is the badass muther 1GHz-to-the-maX choken systems in the m0dd3d Mini-1TX shack factor yeah!

Re:#$@#$ fans

[phrasebook]

The hardest part of putting my system together has been finding a fanless 1.5v AGP video card.

I have a Radeon 9200 with 2 notches on the AGP connector so it can plug in anywhere, and I've used it in both 1.5 and 3.3 slots. These cards are very easy to find. You can also get some fanless 9550 models.

Re:#$@#$ fans

[Anonymous Coward]

You can get 1000 MHz VIA machines that are fanless, and you should be able to replace the heatsink on the 1200 MHz and probably these 1300 MHz CPUs with larger ones to make them passively cooled.

Re:#$@#$ fans

[owlstead]

If it has the "Eden" or "E" name in it, it is fanless. Pretty easy browsing once you notice this. It is not explained anywhere visible on the VIA sites though.

Re:#$@#$ fans

[owlstead]

But as far as Mini-ITX, except for the 533 C3 boards, they all have fans.

This is simply not true. Besides, you can make them fanless by applying a Zalman northbridge cooler (as seen on the net). I haven't done any burn in testing with mine though. One hint: putting them in a wooden enclosure like a wine-box does not do any good. If you need to do stupid things like that you *need* a fan. And a fire-alarm (though you can get the motherboard/cpu to shut down, it has temperature sensors). Yes, I tried.

Re:#$@#$ fans

[Johnboi Waltune]

I used to have a fanless Radeon 9600. Sapphire makes it, try Newegg.

Re:#$@#$ fans

[magarity]

Why aren't we seeing 1 GHz+ fanless systems in the Mini-ITX form factor?

If you have a large enough heatsink made of sufficiently conductive material you can have any system fanless. just because you buy it with a wussy little heatsink that needs a fan shouldn't stop any decent geek from rigging up something better.

Re:#$@#$ fans

[Anonymous Coward]

The hardest part of putting my system together has been finding a fanless 1.5v AGP video card.

Unless you're planning on playing 3D games, you can just take the fan off of most low-end cards with no problem at all. ~90% of the circutry is for 3D anyway.

Re:#$@#$ fans

[bani]

I have a Shuttle SB52G2 with a 2.6ghz Celeron and the HSF is _silent_. The loudest thing in it by far is the WDC WD2000JB-00EVA0.

Sorry you had bad experiences with Shuttles, unless you're expecting 0db or something...

FWIW the quietest drives i've ever had are Maxtor 6Y200P0's. You cant even tell theyre on unless you hold them.

Re:#$@#$ fans

[AndrewRUK]

There is a 1GHz fanless mini-itx board, VIA's EPIA MS 10000E. Add in a silent power supply, and then all you've got left to make silent is the hard drive (and you could make that silent too, by have a solid state drive in the silent box, and pulling everything that won't fit on that off a network drive.)

Re:#$@#$ fans

[johnMG]

> How does one tell what voltage an AGP card is? You go by the gaps in the end of the AGP card that slides into the AGP slot. See http://www.ertyu.org/~steven_nikkel/agpcompatibili ty.html

Re:#$@#$ fans

[johnMG]

> You can also get a fanless 30W PSU for both.

You can even get the power supply as an external unit.

The DSL store sells the one's with the external p/s:
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/store/

Re:#$@#$ fans

[glitch23]

Dell Optiplex machines run very quiet. I can't even tell they are on because of it. The only problem with them is if you get the tower model the damn front USB ports are angled up into the front panel and are impossible to get to if the tower is on the floor.

Re:#$@#$ fans

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh?? I have a FANLESS M10000. It's all in the case:

http://www.silentpcreview.com/article143-page1.htm l

Re:#$@#$ fans

[bani]

AGP cards have different notches in them to prevent you from plugging a card into the wrong voltage slot.

you can buy fanless geforce 6800's btw.

Re:#$@#$ fans

[really?]

there are M6000 - 600MHz - that are fanless as well. I am quite sure I have seen even bigger ones too.

Re:#$@#$ fans

[realkiwi]

You aren't looking in the right place. 800 Mhz is the fastest fanless machine off the shelf but 1Ghz is possible (hush, tranquilPC) and home brew.

Re:#$@#$ fans

[NOPteron]

As long as you prefer quiet to performance, get a Matrox P650: it's fanless dual-head and fully 1/15th the on-card memory-bandwidth of an ATI X800-XL card. . .

( yeah, I know, the in-card-memory-bandwidth isn't the only spec that matters, and I chose it for the contrast, so Too Bad[tm]:
2 or 2.2 GB/s versus 32 GB/s is striking )

Re:#$@#$ fans

[Anonymous Coward]

You aren't looking in the right place. 800 Mhz is the fastest fanless machine off the shelf but 1Ghz is possible (hush, tranquilPC) and home brew.

Nor are you :-p

VIA EPIA MS 10000E LVDS Fanless Mini-ITX Motherboard (1 GHz)

Can't post the # anchor bit to take you straight to the board, Slashcode is munging it into a %23, bah.

Re:#$@#$ fans

[zeet]

I'm using an FX5200 with the fan unplugged. Never even had a glitch with it, and I have used it for what passes for 3D on that card, even for hours at a time. Since I always seem to like three year old games anyway it's hardly been a bottleneck. Actually, in a system with an Athlon64 with near-silent Zalman cooler and Super Tornado power supply, the drives are the loudest thing going - and they're Seagate 7200.7s.

Re:#$@#$ fans

[fishbowl]

Thanks, and thanks Newegg, and thanks Fedex. I got a $40 ATI Card, no fan, and if there's a game that won't work no a 128MB DDR video card, I could care less :)

Is this the best you can do?

[Sheetrock]

I know the hardware is a little more expensive, but I'd most definitely proscribe a Mac Mini instead. PC components just don't seem to be designed with longevity in mind anymore, and it gets worse when you pack all that stuff into a tiny cube.

If you're about the cool factor (which is probably the case here) just buy regular-sized hardware, a polyurethane case and LEDs. You don't even need to put an OS on it, just the stickers.

Re:Is this the best you can do?

[stratjakt]

Congrats! I knew some asshat would post "MacMini's are better!" for some arbitrary reason. That person is you.

I guess you're saying Macs are built to last forever? Heh.. They look like worse than an XBox on the inside.

Good work, and keep up the slashdot groupthink and Apple astroturfing.

Re:Is this the best you can do?

[Anonymous Coward]

Part of the reason for buying mini-itx is the power requirements. Mini-itx boards use a lot less power than a P4 or Athlon and are cheaper than a Pentium-M solution.

Re:Is this the best you can do?

[Anonymous Coward]

I know the hardware is a little more expensive, but I'd most definitely proscribe a Mac Mini instead. PC components just don't seem to be designed with longevity in mind anymore, and it gets worse when you pack all that stuff into a tiny cube.

Umm, the Mac G4 Cube was plagued with problems including cracked plastic casing, static electric problems with the power switch, heat related issues, etc. Technically Apple has a pretty horrible track record when it comes to making tiny cube computers. How do you know the Mac Mini won't be a dud after 6 months? It's brand new.

Now, with that in mind, I'd buy one too if I had to choose between a Via Epia system and a Mac Mini these days. My diskless Via Epia system with 256MB of RAM was about $350 a year ago (with the case included) so the Mac Mini isn't too far off pricewise considering it has a hard drive and software worth much more than $200.

Re:Is this the best you can do?

[Jameth]

Not designed with longevity in mind? What are you talking about? I'm still running the cheapest piece of crap I could find four years ago. An entire system (minus the video card, I reused my Voodoo3 2000) for only 200 bucks and it still works. My mother still has her fully working PC from back in 1997, without problems (although she's upgrading this month because she wants something a bit faster).

And anything newer than that, how do you know it won't last? For that matter, do you not realize that most of the components are identical? Apple doesn't usually make their own hardware, they buy it, and they buy it from the same people the PC manufacturers buy it from.

Stop spreading stupidity.

Re:Is this the best you can do?

[Jozer99]

Ya! Where do these Mac people get their ideas from. The same underpaid Tawanese make Mac motherboards, and most of the other components are the exact same brands as PC ones (HD, optical, ect). The only thing Mac makes are the nice pretty plastic and metal cases, and the keyboards and mice. And the keyboards and mice are pretty darn unreliable, from seeing them in action in a computer lab. That pretty clear and white plastic does not stand up well to abuse of high schoolers.

Re:Is this the best you can do?

[drinkypoo]

proscribe, 1: To denounce or condemn.

Here's a quick hint for you, don't use words you can't spell. Maybe you meant to say prescribe, to set down as a rule or guide; enjoin, to order the use of (a medicine or other treatment).

Now that I've gotten that over with: Mac minis are expensive and proprietary. The memory is not even a user-serviceable part, in terms of your warranty. (Look it up!) The ONLY good thing about it is the cool form factor. It has very limited expansion (even down to having only 1 1394 port) and is only $499 with the most limited hardware and no peripherals. If you want a machine for the looks, buy a mini. However, most of the software that most people want to run out there runs either on Linux, in which case there is no benefit to the Mini beyond the aesthetic, or on Windows, in which case the Mini can't help you.

Re:Is this the best you can do?

[Anonymous Coward]

Man you must have really high blood pressure, in the past few days I have seen you post several "you're an idiot" type posts. Good work, keep up the Slashdot flamebaiting.

Re:Is this the best you can do?

[Anonymous Luddite]

> The ONLY good thing about it is the cool form factor.

You've gotta admit the package is cool. Might not be the best comp, but I could see parking one of these on top of my "real" computer with a KVM attached... ..or even better yet, mod it right into the case.

I've spent 500 bucks on stupider things..

Re:Is this the best you can do?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm still running the cheapest piece of crap I could find four years ago

Well, I don't want to sound like a "they don't make 'em like they used to" troll, maybe I have bad luck, but I've had lots of modern equipment fail lately while my older systems continue to run fine.

I have dual pentium II with an uptime aproaching 2 years, and it was in use as a desktop system long before that. But I've had 2 nVidia 6800 GT's fail, a broken nVidia 5600 Ultra, a ASUS motherboard, and a Antec TrueBlue 480 fail all in the course of one year. With the exception of the 6800's these parts were all on different computers. So like I said, either I have bad luck or new hardware is crap.

Re:Is this the best you can do?

[SunFan]

Regarding longevity, I wonder if it depends on a person's Mystical Breakage Probability Field. In my decade+ of using PCs and UNIX workstations, the only components I've had fail were a 13 year old full-height SCSI drive, a super-cheap Pentium 75 motherboard, and a who-knows-how-old stick of generic RAM purchased used. Other people I know have had similar experiences with a hard drive here or a RAM stick there--really nothing extraordinary.

However, occasionally I'll read a post about someone defending extended warranties or AppleCare, and it seems every piece of electronics they touch turns to dust, explodes, or grows legs and attacks the family. Quite interesting, given my own anecdotal experience with electronics.

So, are the people defending extended warranties cursed by the MBPF...or do they work for the warranty underwriter?

Re:Is this the best you can do?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think my Mystical Breakage Probability Field that you speak of has been disrupted. Lately everything I touch breaks, but it didn't used to be like that. Maybe I can severely overclock my CPU then submit a story to Slashdot that links to my server. I wonder if this is an acceptable sacrifice to repent and appease the hardware gods.

Re:Is this the best you can do?

[martinbogo]

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 .. say .. Dell were to create a similar computer. Closed form factor, 256Meg ram, 2.8Ghz processor, etc in a pretty case.

Re:Is this the best you can do?

[Grey_14]

I would like to present myself as one of these poor people affected by MBPF, I'm a computer tech, I fix computers, and other peoples computers behave wonderfully under my hands, but everytime for the last 5 years that I've tried to upgrade my computer, (And keep in mind, I'm only entering my second decade of this thing we call life), has caused some kind of failure, bad motherboards, harddrive failures, bad RAM, exploding video cards, and so on, I thank my lucky star's for the manufacturers warranty, and the longer the better :)

Re:Is this the best you can do?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dell + pretty case ^^^^^^^

Error. Does not compute.

Re:Is this the best you can do?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I happen to like my own built PCs. When something breaks (which isn't that common, but it does happen), I just swap out the bad part with another off-the-shelf part, and go on my merry way. As cool as the Mac Mini is, from the look of it, if something went wrong you'd end up pitching the entire thing in the trash, save for a stick of DDR memory and a perhaps a slow laptop harddrive.

Re:Is this the best you can do?

[cwg_at_opc]

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=300 572/ note that they say "...should be installed by an Apple Authorized Service Provider." that's "should" not "only" by an AASP.

and http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=250 97/ "...Adding DRAM, VRAM or other user-installable upgrade or expansion products to an Apple computer is not considered a modification to that Apple product."

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.htm l/

[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//

Re:Is this the best you can do?

[Deliveranc3]

2. ???
3. Profit!

Re:Is this the best you can do?

[drinkypoo]

Non-technical readers can piss up a rope. This is slashdot. I'm not talking about the appeal of the Mac Mini to the sheeple at large, I'm talking about slashdotters. I don't CARE about the sheeple.

Guess what? The programs on the mac aren't consistent either. Even they have their own programs that look different from the rest of the OS, IE quicktime. For that matter Apple can't be bothered to follow anyone else's look and feel guidelines, so why should anyone care about theirs? Clicking on the close gadget of a non-foreground iTunes window will raise the window! Idiots.

I don't remember the Sun1, but I certainly remember using glass TTYs. I sat at a VT100-AA for a long, long time.

The lid on the mini should not be designed so poorly that it is easy to break when trying to do something so simple as replace the memory. Who designed this box, linksys? Casio? It's crap. They could have put a hole with a door which in turn has a screw to hold it in on the bottom and put the dimm slots on the bottom of the board. This would have made sense. Instead they tell you to open the case with a sharpened putty knife. It's a piece of crap, plain and simple. No respectable computer snaps together.

Re:Is this the best you can do?

[cwg_at_opc]

"Non-technical readers can piss up a rope" - nice attitude.;-)

and who made you the arbiter of "respectable" computers? there's plenty of crap that's put together with screws, so what makes a respectable computer? it's a computing _appliance_ not a hacker's dream. are you just afraid that your choice of platform is less secure and less usable than a mac, and that's why a mac is crap?

"Clicking on the close gadget of a non-foreground iTunes window will raise the window! Idiots." - i just opened up itunes and then raised safari to the front; clicking on the close button of itunes closed the window. your description doesn't seem to happen on my desktop(dual g4/400/768MB 10.3.8), doesn't do it on my XP box either. what are you talking about?

i do agree with you about the mini's lid; it's a dumb design for someone who wants to get inside, but again, the target audience _isn't_ slashdot's highly technical readers. slashdotters who want to use a mini will appreciate the design and then take it apart anyway and use the guts as they see fit. it seems to bother you that apple's industrial design surpasses a large percentage of the PC industry and allows them to design a computer that's more like an appliance; when was the last time you opened up your microwave to overclock it? we're not talking Tool Time with Tim here.

the expandability of the EPIA(mini-itx) series is cartainly better than the mini(there's 2 slots for ram, ususally a PCI slot, SATA, IDE, sometimes a flash reader) but you don't get apple's software. and not everyone wants to spend a lot of time building apps(not that it's big deal with gentoo, but i'm not an average user.)

Re:Is this the best you can do?

[drinkypoo]

The iTunes close-raises behavior was witnessed on my XP box. yesterday. It's XPSP2 and Itunes 4.7 (not 4.71, so maybe they fixed it? ha ha.)

Re:Is this the best you can do?

[enrico_suave]

"You've gotta admit the package is cool. Might not be the best comp, but I could see parking one of these on top of my "real" computer with a KVM attached... ..or even better yet, mod it right into the case."

I've heard rumblings about some people having trouble with the mac mini and KVM switches (FYI, FWIW) Might be worth a google search before plunking down your 500 beans =)

e.

But as mysql server, not so good

[Anonymous Coward]

All i can see is "too many connections".

PDA/Smartphone Optimized Sites and Pron

[Supp0rtLinux]

PDA/Smartphone Optimized Sites

PDA/Smartphone Optimized Pron

Re:PDA/Smartphone Optimized Sites and Pron

[drinkypoo]

If it were really PDA/smartphone-optimized, all images would be taller than they are wide. I am of course talking about the porn here. I call shenanigans!

Why epiOS?

[woah]

Can anyone please enlghten me on what so special about epiOS linux that other distros can't manage?

Or, more to the point what the hell is it anyway?

If it is what I think it is, which is a distro that is taylored toward EPIA, why make a whole distro and not just a tarball of linux drivers and tools?

Re:Why epiOS?

[wahsapa]

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.

Re:Why epiOS?

[dr.badass]

If it is what I think it is, which is a distro that is taylored toward EPIA, why make a whole distro and not just a tarball of linux drivers and tools?

All that's really involved in creating a "new" distribution is changing a few strings. Very, very, few distributions are from scratch these days.

I think the idea in this case is that it's better to put a disc in the box that says "Install me", rather than a bundle of packages that may or may not work, depending on what system you're running.

In any event, we all know that bundled software is probably crap, so it's kind of a moot point.

Re:Why epiOS?

[isolationism]

There are some pretty "heavy" changes to get the EPIA working well -- Kernel patches, a Unichrome (graphics) driver for Xfree86 (none for X.org yet, sadly :( ), etc.

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.

Re:Why epiOS?

[pavon]

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.

Re:Why epiOS?

[GnarlyNome]

http://linux.about.com/cs/linux101/g/linuxslshepia .htm

Re:Why epiOS?

[realkiwi]

You forgot to add that the unichrome driver is in xrog CVS now but otherwise you have it right. I am about to embark on a debian version of the same.

Re:Why epiOS?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Unichrome driver has nothing to do with via.
They don't even get any support from via. They have done a great job!

Via just doesn't get open source. They fork projects, without giving back (and don't do security related updates). Their video drivers are a joke, and are just their windows drivers f*cked up until they worked in Xfree (sort of). You have to run an outdated distro to run via's drivers (and don't even think of doing a kernel security patch because your driver might suddenly not work anymore).

Some notes for editors and submitters

[drinkypoo]

Well well well, once again another craptacular story submission wafts through the submission process. Thanks, Timothy! You really go the extra mile towards making slashdot more and more crap.

First, here is a link for the VIA EPIA SP line. Notice how the link is descriptive of the content linked to? This is what we the thinking people of the internet refer to as "proper" use of links. The link text should have included "review on the brandnew" (sic) which should have had a couple of additional spaces, one after brand, and one after new, before the link.

Finally, the story submission itself is devoid of content and linked to a site that everyone involved should have known would go down quicker than a crackwhore on your payday. If you're going to link to a site that's going to crater, please give us some information in the story itself.

Nehemiah, I know you were all excited that you had something to submit to slashdot, but couldn't you have taken a little bit of time to work on your story submission? I won't even bother chastising Timothy, who it has long since become clear is not willing to put out any effort at all.

Re:Some notes for editors and submitters

[Anonymous Coward]

lighten up you whiny %#$#. if you want to see what a link links to just hold your mouse over it for a second. now take the carrot out of your **s, arrogant knowitall.

Re:Some notes for editors and submitters

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps Nehemiah had a reason not to insert the link you suggested. That link mentions that the board "features the VIA C3 processor based on the C5P Nehemiah core." Reading that might have given some readers the impression that Nehemiah had a financial interest in posting this item...

Re:Some notes for editors and submitters

[Kris_J]

Yeah, yeah, Slashdot sucks, blah, blah.

How well does it play World of Warcraft?

(That's actually a serious question, there have been reports that the textures corrupt on the UniChrome chipsets.)

Re:Some notes for editors and submitters

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, well, well, another nerd on Slashdot complains about its editors but reads anyway. How is this "interesting" anymore? There should be a mod category called "expected". ;p

Re:Some notes for editors and submitters

[Bob Bitchen]

Cool board. But does it really have jumpers? I thought jumpers were long gone. Maybe I've been out of touch with the state of the art.

BTW funny stuff about the submitters. If you're expecting stories to get any kind of verification I think you're going to be disappointed. Hell the NY Times can't even get that done. Why would you think that slashdot would be able to?

Re:Some notes for editors and submitters

[drinkypoo]

Well the fact that it's all on the internet makes it easy...

Re:Some notes for editors and submitters

[Donny Smith]

>If you're expecting stories to get any kind of verification I think you're going to be disappointed. Hell the NY Times can't even get that done

I can understand that something can't be 100% verified. That is fine.
The grandparent, however, rightly complains that the /. isn't even *trying* and I share the impression.

slashdot.org more and more feels like some fucked-up wikinewsia - you can post corrections, you can give suggestions, you can curse, but it'll always have new lame stories with tons of stupid mistakes, typos, duplicates and yesterday's (or yesteryear's) content.
Even with open source projects, once you propose or create a fix, it rarely re-appears. Here, though, re-emergence of crap is the rule.
What the FUCK is going on?

Re: proscribed mac minis...

[Anonymous Coward]

. . . I'd most definitely proscribe a Mac Mini . . .

[grammar Nazi mode=ON]
From Merriam-Webster online:

One entry found for proscribe.
Main Entry: proscribe
Pronunciation: prO-'skrIb
Function: transitive verb
Inflected Form(s): proscribed; proscribing
Etymology: Latin proscribere to publish, proscribe, from pro- before + scribere to write -- more at SCRIBE
1 : to publish the name of as condemned to death with the property of the condemned forfeited to the state
2 : to condemn or forbid as harmful or unlawful : PROHIBIT
- proscriber noun

[/grammar Nazi]

Thanks for the warning, I'll stay away from them.

Because...

[PrimeWaveZ]

MPEG2/4 playback is the first benchmark any informed computer buyer should look at.

Re:Because...

[ShaniaTwain]

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.

Re:Because...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Because...

[tomstdenis]

... VIA boxes are often used as media boxes. They're certainly not good workstations.

So yeah MPEG playback is a good idea...

Re:Because...

[PrimeWaveZ]

I'm just saying that devoid of any information but a comment on MPEG playback, the story is rather bare

Re:Because...

[tomstdenis]

There's an article? ... since when?

This is news to me.

Re:Because...

[forkazoo]

Well, obviously, different folks will want to see different benchmarks, but how many people concerned with SPEC, Linpack, or Doom3 are even in the target market for this type of system? Seriously, the only useful benchmark is whatever you want to do with a system. Anything else is just bragging rights. Since a lot of people want to play media on these systems, media playback is a logical benchmark.

Re:Because...

[chill]

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

Re:Because...

[Anonymous Coward]

Some people are concerned with exactly such benchmarks: Just look at this Beowulf cluster of these.

The reason for doing it with VIA boards being that they generate less heat (and use less power). The 12-node (800 MHz) cluster in the link runs at 140-200 watts, apparently.

But does it run?

[ShaniaTwain]

Thats all I want to know.. does it run or does it just sit there and smolder like the server thats hosting that review? ..and does it smolder linux?

Legacy Ports

[stupidcomputers]

Why oh why on these new small form factor devices do they insist on keeping legacy ports such as serial or the old PS2 style mouse and keyboard? Either make it small and get rid of them or put something useful such as firewire there instead.

Re:Legacy Ports

[ZorinLynx]

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

Re:Legacy Ports

[Anonymous Coward]

Because serial is very useful to pvr users. Lots of older (still in use by the millions) motorola cable boxes have a serial connection you can use to control the box.

Re:Legacy Ports

[Bradee-oh!]

I use standard DB9 rs232 ports as well as parallel ports for all sorts of testing, debugging, and even deployment applications. I've deployed epia boards in energy management systems more than once utilitizing the serial and parallel ports.

Yes i know that you get get usb->serial converters and usb->parallel converters. And for notebook/desktop applications that makes sense. However these boards are obiously not mainstream. They are often used for development/prototyping and for low power applications. The needs for that market are different.

At least that's my take on it. I for one am glad to see not EVERYONE is going "legacy free."

Re:Legacy Ports

[Anonymous Coward]

Because embedded systems use a lot of legacy hardware! How many industrial devices have you seen that used the firewire that you mentioned? I work full-time with embedded systems, and I've never seen one. Serial is still king.

We build about 20 different products using the Via EPIA CL ITX motherboards, and on every single one of them, we use four RS232 serial ports and the parallel port. The OS, like a lot of real-time OS's, we use doesn't support USB keyboards so we have to use PS/2-style keyboards. If you want to remain compatible with PC software, you must have a normal keyboard port.

To put it a different way, the embedded world revolves around interfaces that don't change.

Re:Legacy Ports

[snuf23]

"Where else are you going to plug in your vintage IBM Model M clicky-keyboard?"

Rejoice! Thanks to the miracle of modern technology, now you can use that Model M with a USB only computer!

IBM model M ps/2 cable to USB adapter converter

Warning, link contains pictures of a Mac Mini using a genuine IBM Model M.

Re:Legacy Ports

[w8300v-2]

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..

Re:Legacy Ports

[Anonymous Coward]

Because more people use them than whinge about their inclusion. :P

Re:Legacy Ports

[ZorinLynx]

Sweet! Most USB/PS2 adapters I've tried did not work properly with the M, as that page said.

It seems computer manufacturers can't keep their own freakin' standards.

But now that I know that one will work, it's ordering time!

-Z

Re:Legacy Ports

[snuf23]

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!

Re:Legacy Ports

[TheUglyAmerican]

Then perhaps you would like the MS-series EPIA motherboard?

http://www.viaembedded.com/product/epia_ms_spec.js p?motherboardId=281

Re:Legacy Ports

[Lisandro]

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.

Re:Legacy Ports

[Anonymous Coward]

I for one have the 4x serial RS-232 EPIA-CL versions. I use the EPIA boards as embedded data loggers. The data comes in on RS-232 lines, and we're not about to start replacing $30k instruments because they don't have USB out. The USB->serial converters aren't bulletproof and are wasted power.
It drives me nuts that new laptops don't even have one serial port.

Also I can hardware-hack RS-232 with a paperclip when out in the field. KISS. That's worth a lot.

Re:Legacy Ports

[Anonymous Coward]

I think serial is still used in PVR solutions to change the channel on the cable/satellite decoder box. Otherwise, you have to rig some clunky IR hack.

Re:Legacy Ports

[KiloByte]

Or rather, why would anyone use a flaky interface such as USB for connecting one's mouse or keyboard?

All hardware people I personally know detest it, especially for keyboards. They often cause issues at boot-time, tend to interact badly with motherboards, etc. For example, a mouse I've personally saw at a customer triggered wake-up a few seconds after the machine was powered off, even though all relevant settings in the BIOS were disabled.

PS/2 (and even DIN) connectors just work. Reliably.

Re:Legacy Ports

[haggar]

About a monthagoI was all fired up to buy a Mac Mini. However, since I do a lot of embedded development (microcontrollers and FPGAs), the need for a rock-solid serial and parallel ports is mandatory. Most USB to rs232 and USB to parallel converters are not good enough for the JTAG probes and dev boards I need to work with.

Therefore, I didn't buy the Mac Mini. However, I have seriously started looking at an EPIA based system with the Nehemiah core. Solid performance, and all my devtools are supported. Apple could have had my money, but they preferred to be snotty about these "old" ports.

Re:Legacy Ports

[bobbozzo]

I like to use an old USR ISA modem with CallerID to see who's calling.

I've had bad experiences with PCI (win)modems.

However, my new mb has no ISA slots, so I am now going to have to use an external modem.

Mod parent down... look

[Eric(b0mb)Dennis]

Check out his posting history

Notice all those additional adds from his mirrors? I smell a Roland-wannabe...

Would this work in a car?

[bergeron76]

Would it make a good carputer? If so, we'd love to syndicate the content and post about it.

Re:Would this work in a car?

[silencery]

hell yeah. I'm using an m10000 in my car right now. www.mp3car.com people have been doing this for some time now.

1fuCk a mare

[Anonymous Coward]

Se5sion an3 join in fastest-growing GAY am protesting 4, which by all

Re:1fuCk a mare

[Anonymous Coward]

What?

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

[Eric(b0mb)Dennis]

A whois on this dubious website that seems to just mirror/copy slashdot, networkmirror.com, revealed it was reigstered through a proxy-domain registar.. domainsbyproxy.com

A simple look at the site will show it's very plain and shows very little work done besides straight mirroring/copying slashdot.

Registered through: GoDaddy.com
(http://www.godaddy.com)

Domain Name: NETWORKMIRROR.COM

Created on: 01-Apr-05

Expires on: 01-Apr-06

Last Updated on: 01-Apr-05

April 1st, eh? Look at this guy's posting history again.. This here was the first post of his showing 'mirrors'.. on April 4th...

Re:ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

[winkydink]

Thank you.

The mirror concept is similar to (but different from) mirrordot. Hosted servers cost bucks (this isn't sitting on the end of a dsl line to my mom's basement :).

However, unlike merely copying somebody else's work and presenting as my own, I'm providing a service to reach sites that are responding slowly when slashdotted.

It's all still very experimental.

Re:ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

[winkydink]

It's registered that way because I want some privacy for me & my family. Is that asking too much?

I will point out that, unlike you, I do have a publicly published email address.

Also, my posting history, which is similar in length to your own, speaks for itself.

Flaky LAN drivers under FreeBSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

I talked to an Epia owner about FreeBSD-compatibility, and he mentioned that the dual LAN models he had were having some problems with FreeBSD 4.x and 5.x. I can't remember the exact Epia models, but he mentioned that both of the interfaces were different models of VIA RHINE II. The problem apparently was that the other interface choked and hanged under very little stress.

It looks like the new Epias still have similar NICs; can anyone shed any light on this issue?

Re:Flaky LAN drivers under FreeBSD?

[cpghost]

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.

Re:Flaky LAN drivers under FreeBSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, thanks. :)

They're out there

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem isn't the fans. It's the whiney little cpu fan. When you go to a fanless mini-itx, you get a whiney psu fan instead.

The Via C3 come in socket 370 format, so there must be some 370 boards that work with them. I can run passive cooling on the C3. That will quiet down that box.

Re:They're out there

[Anonymous Coward]

www.mini-box.com has some awesome fanless PSU options, actually.

blech VIA

[blackicye]

I've never had a good experience with a VIA chipset motherboard.

Sure they're cheap, but thats about all I can say about them.

This reeks of Astroturf..
VIA - Nehemiah

Re:blech VIA

[timothy]

I have a no longer new, but not the oldest, model from VIA. It's an EPIA M9000, if I remember right, but it's not nearby for me to check. Though it's slow, that has been one of my most reliable computers;I bought it something like 3.5 years ago now, and it's not balked at any of the Linux distros I put onto it; no chipset issues except sound that didn't cooperate sometimes. With Mepis (and recent Knoppix versions) it's been great.

However, as another poster mentioned, if you're looking for a small system, the cost of building a complete EPIA system makes a Mac mini looks like a very good deal (which I think it is anyhow); the mini is also much smaller than any mini-ITX system.

(If you want to run other than an OS from Microsoft of Apple, there are versions of Linux and BSD for x86 and PPC chips, of course, but that's where the VIA does have one advantage -- there are many more OS options for X86 chips.)

My relatively happy VIA experience doesn't mean much, but it's a data point at least.

timothy

Re:blech VIA

[num42]

For all i hear that is only true for motherboards of other manufacturers based on the VIA chipsets.

It seems that if VIA builds the board themselves the board runs flawlessly and the chipset is supportive of every aspect of the hardware, especially when it comes to saving power.

I did not have a single problem with the Mini-ITX board of my Router running Linux (802.1q, PPPoE, named, dhcpdv3, asterisk).
Could be that i just haven't read about the problems of others for i had none. ;)

Zap

Via Epia DP

[Anonymous Coward]

Now that would be cool. Literally. Dual processors! (drool) Want one now!

Annoying but not surprising

[billstewart]

Some people probably use these boards to actually talk to the RS232, or to talk parallel port to an older printer or whatever. I suspect the real issue is that they're using an older SouthBridge chip that has all those ports on it, so they figure they might as well populate them.

Personally I'd rather have a couple of extra USB2 ports and an extra network port (though you can add the network port via USB, or you can add a wireless connection via USB since there's no PCMCIA.)

PVR? Really?

[Digital Pizza]

Well, the site's slashdotted and the mirror put up in another post only has the first page, so I have some questions.

First, just how well is Linux supported by this? Are there open-source drivers for the MPEG2/4 decoding hardware?

Second, there is mention of the idea of using this as a PVR; does this board have the huevos necessary for real-time encoding? I understand that the epia line is pretty wimpy in the CPU department, and MythTV, at least, requires more than I think this board can do. It has MPEG decoding, not encoding hardware.

Re:PVR? Really?

[rusty0101]

Whether the MPEG2/4 decoding hardware drivers are open source or not is only relevent for people who insist upon compiling everything themselves. If that includes you, I can't answer your question.

I am aware that KnoppMyth has supported this hardware for playback. Again whether it is an out of the box install and run situation I can't comment on, I don't have one, so I have not tested it. You are welcome to check over at and persue the forums to see if your question is addressed.

MythTV recomends a 450mhz processor, this one is 1300 mhz (or there abouts.) Now that does not mean that there may not be other problems. My own personal experience with via dma drivers is that they do not support sustained data transfer worth the purcase of any via product. That would honestly be my concern, not whether there are drivers for the MPEG2/4, or whether Processor speed is sufficent.

Granted I would expect to be using this as a driveless front end myself, which might eliviate the problem. Then again...

~Rusty

Re:PVR? Really?

[spagetti_code]

I've spend considerable time on this, so allow me to share my pain...

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.

Re:PVR? Really?

[nmos]

Whether the MPEG2/4 decoding hardware drivers are open source or not is only relevent for people who insist upon compiling everything themselves.

Not true at all. It's also relevent to people who don't want a $50 purchase to dictate all the other hardware and software they are allowed to run. Allow closed source drivers and it's easy to end up in a situation where your video card needs kernel X but your sound card drivers only work with kernel Y and that bug that causes your system to crash once a week was only fixed in kernel Z.

As for the MythTV requirements:

The exact requirements varry mostly depending on what capture card you have. If your caputure card does encoding in hardware (and whatever it generates is compatable with MythTV and whatever else you might want to use) then almost anything will work. IMHO the biggest limitation of this board is that with just one PCI slot you're stuck with just one capture card.

Re:PVR? Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am currently running a FANLESS, DISKLESS M10000 which boots over the network and loads MythTV 0.17.

It works flawlessly.

As you say, the VIA boards perform decoding but not encoding. That's why I have a PVR-250 running on my MythTV server. All the encoding I need to do is performed server side by my capture card. I don't /need/ to perform any ENcoding on my MythTV front end.

For more info about this, check the forums on:

http://www.linpvr.org

Re:PVR? Really?

[bani]

imho that case is just like any other generic HTPC set top case.

now thats a case.

Re:PVR? Really?

[spagetti_code]

Comes with a more respectable price too.

Re:PVR? Really?

[realkiwi]

http://unichrome.sourceforge.net/ project on sourceforge.

The CLE266 MPEG acceleration is working. The new chipset used by this board is under way.

Why would you want to encode in a PVR? I just write MPEG2 DVB-S streams to disk with VDR and watch them with xine. If I want to record to DVD I used vdrsync and write the file to DVD format.

CPU usage for DVD and DVB acceleration on 1 Ghz Epia is 10-15%

Re:PVR? Really?

[rusty0101]

Actually I would not use this to capture video at all.

The goal of the Home Theatre PC next to the TV is to provide as little interference with watching what you have recorded as possible.

As has been mentioned before, this board provides a small form factor device that by design does not require a large number of loud fans to keep quiet.

Capturing video, whether by a card that does the mpeg encoding in hardware, or through the cpu, tends to generate quite a bit of heat that needs to be removed from the system in some way. At the moment the most efficient mechanism for doing that is cooling fans, which tend to generate noise.

Likewise adding a hard drive to this system is likely to add both a source of noise, and an additional source of heat that needs to be removed. You may be able to reduce both via various supported control of some hard drives. However doing that will often reduce the opportunity for recording raw video if you are not using hardware compression in some way.

Lastly with regards to recording, a quick search hear on slashdot will reveal that Plextor has released the souce code for their USB capture devices, or at least a subst of them. Even donated a device to the lead developer for MythTV.

Now with regards to incompatibilities between binary drivers for the decoder on this system, and other drivers for sound cards, etc. Unless you plan on using that PCI slot for a sound card, instead of for either a superior video output device (to the embeded video card) or the afformentioned capture card, it is not at all unlikely that the same people who make available the decoder binaries, will be more than happy to throw in binaries for the rest of the hardware on that motherboard. Presumably they have some idea of what works with what.

The place where binary only drivers will cause a problem is when it comes time to update the kernel on a device using a binary only driver. For people like me, who likes to use the full rev of KnoppMyth, I don't see this as a significant issue. Granted that may be conciet or ignorance on my part.

~Rusty

Re:PVR? Really?

[InsaneProcessor]

Real simple on the PVR. I just dropped a Hauppauge PVR-250 on a pci right angle riser and everything works great. I run on a 600Mhz CPU (fanless) and I have no problems running on WinXP. I don't have the time to spend hours or days debugging Linux drivers and configs.

Re:PVR? Really?

[Digital Pizza]

I was just going by the requirements of MythTV (as I remember them). Sounds like it's working well for you, though. Glad the chipset is supported by Linux.

Re:PVR? Really?

[Digital Pizza]

Thanks for the informative reply. The stability problem is what I was afraid of - seems to be in keeping with Via's reputation.

Have you considered the (admittedly expensive) Pentium M board from AOpen?

Mini, slightly off-topic rant:
I love Athlon chips, but I hate the fact that for a long time just about the only chipset option available for them was from Via, and they always seemed to be buggy. I think this is why so many people are prejudiced against Athlons and recommend Intel for stability.

A few years ago I build an Athlon-based system and chose the only board I could find that had the least amount of Via components: the Asus A7M266, which has an AMD northbridge, but a Via southbridge. Guess what? The southbridge has a bug in it which can cause DMA problems between the IDE and Soundblaster Live! card, and which prevents the CPU from truly idling (so it always runs hot). Thankfully the NForce it here now (though you need to use an NVidia video card with it for 3D support under Linux).

And so ends of my off-topic rant about Via.

Re:PVR? Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

I did some googling on this a month ago, and it seems that VIA has slowly improved. The 600 and especially the 800 series chipsets should work as advertised, and I've been very happy with the K8T800 board I bought last month.

Re:PVR? Really?

[enrico_suave]

FWIW: even if you have a much more beefy system, you're better off using a tuner/encoder card that has hardware based MPEG encoding.

I use a via epia m10k in one of my PC PVRs and by using a pvr250/350 it handles recording and playback pretty easily.
(gratuituous self links)

The EPIA VIA M-series (and higher like this SP) have a mpeg decoding accelleration (not full on decoding) but it down help.

E.

What's the fanless obsession anyhow?

[phorm]

I've got a new 1Ghz VIA in place right now, only fan is a teeny one that makes less noise than the drives, etc.

Sure, dust is a consideration over time, but even without the fan too much dust tends to impair the heatsinks' dissipation rate as well...

Re:What's the fanless obsession anyhow?

[idlake]

Tiny fans actually tend to be noiser.

In any case, another reason not to use fans is that they fail frequently, lowering overall reliability.

Re:What's the fanless obsession anyhow?

[johnMG]

The things that break down on computers the most are things with moving parts: that's hard disks, fans, and occasionally floppy/CD drives (only occasionally since they don't run all the time).

If I want a reliable system, I want to eliminate any weak links that I can. For the ultimate in fanless, some folks eliminate the hard disk in favor of flash memory; I wish I understood it better, but I think the deal is to mount the flash memory as read-only, and then create a writable partition in RAM. This way the OS isn't constantly writing to the flash memory and thus not wearing it out as quick.

Also, I'm guessing that, for the folks doing audio work, any moving parts also add noise. But that's just a guess.

Re:What's the fanless obsession anyhow?

[quintesse]

It might be one tiny fan but I assure you that if it sits below your TV if you use it as a media center you _will_ notice the noise it makes (unless you only see action movies of course ;-)

Re:What's the fanless obsession anyhow?

[cpghost]

If the fanless obsession were really more widespread, it would put pressure on CPU makers to invent better heat dissipation mechanisms, and to generate less heat in the first place!

Mac Mini vs EPIA

[tomRakewell]

I have installed Linux on a dozen Mini-ITX boards during the past two years. I love the low power consumption, and the low price.

But, by just about any standard (MPEG playback, video performance, processor speed, form factor size), the Mac Mini beats the Mini-ITX hands down. Okay, I put nicer hard drives in the Mini-ITX boxes than I get in the Mac Mini.

After using both systems as desktop PCs, I can say that the Mac Mini feels like a Ferrari, while the Mini-ITX boxes feel like a Ford Focus. Apart from the fact I actually *like* the Gnome desktop better than OS X, I can still use the Mini to run all of my favorite Unix apps. And, unlike the VIA Mini-ITX boards, where there's a ton of hardware that I can't get to work right (CLE-266 chipset with MPEG decoding), everything on the Mac Mini JUST WORKS.

I don't know. I'm thinking my days running Mini-ITX boxes is over. The Mac Mini has really won my heart, and I can't see why anyone wouldn't consider it for their small form-factor computing needs.

I'm a bit tempted by the promise of a Linux distro tailor-made for the EPIAs, but I kind of have a distro (OS X) tailor made for my current-favorite SFF box.

Re:Mac Mini vs EPIA

[idlake]

everything on the Mac Mini JUST WORKS.

Ah, I see, another member of the Apple-sponsored "JUST WORKS" marketing campaign.

Everything always "JUST WORKS" on machines with preinstalled supported operating systems, whether it's OSX, Windows, or Linux. Things can stop working once you start installing third party apps or new hardware, on any of those systems, including the Mac Mini.

Re:Mac Mini vs EPIA

[turpie]

Fair enough, but where can I get a Mini-ITX system pre-installed with linux.

Re:Mac Mini vs EPIA

[bani]

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).

Re:Mac Mini vs EPIA

[dubbreak]

Apart from the fact I actually *like* the Gnome desktop better than OS X, I can still use the Mini to run all of my favorite Unix apps.

Umm, why don't you run yellow dog linux? Then you can run all your favorite linux apps with your favorite desktop environment.

Re:Mac Mini vs EPIA

[idlake]

Look for "mini-itx linux preinstalled" on Google; you'll find a bunch of hits.

Yes, it is a bummer that there are no major vendors doing this and marketing it, but Mini-ITX are kind of specialty systems. There are plenty of bigger vendors that sell other Linux systems (including small ones) preinstalled.

Re:Mac Mini vs EPIA

[Anonymous Coward]

Or just click that checkbox labeled "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible"

Re:Mac Mini vs EPIA

[dublin]

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).

Horseapples! Where are you getting this stuff? Notebook drives are tougher in every way than their desktop counterparts - they have to be. I suppose that some super-cheap notebook drives that aren't rated for continuous use may exist, but I'm not aware of any, and that certainly doesn't apply to the reputable brands. I've got several tiny little servers that have been running laptop drives for years with no problems. (One's an Epson "cash register" 486, another's a Toshiba Libretto 50J, and others are even stranger.)

And although hard disks aren't my specialty, I know more than a little about them, having been a program manager for both Latitude and Inspiron at Dell, and spinning up a company to build high performance storage-over-IP solutions based on high-end commodity RAID controllers a few years ago. The only real downside to Notebook disks is their relatively slow transfer speeds, since the disk mfrs for unfathomable reasons don't put serious controllers on the notbook mechanisms for a year or two. In many cases (especially if you're RAIDING them) this is more than made up for by their lower seek times - the heads don't have to move very far, and because they're smaller and less massive, they respond quicker.

I'm looking at building a custom small, low-power, super reliable RAID array for a client right now, and I'm actually looking even smaller - at the 1.8" mechanisms like the ones in a lot of the new MP3 players. The result will be *far* more reliable than any desktop drive could ever be - I could not possibly neet this customer's requirements with desktop drive hardware...

Re:Mac Mini vs EPIA

[realkiwi]

CLE266 does not do MPEG 2 decoding it does MPEG 2 acceleration.

I am about to begin work on a ubuntu derivative that has CLE266 support built in. Hang out on the unichrome list for more help on getting your working.

Re:Mac Mini vs EPIA

[Anonymous Coward]

ahh. so you're the guy to blame for my shitty unreliable inspiron notebook. thanks a lot pal.

Re:Mac Mini vs EPIA

[jkxx]

Darn. I would be really interested into test-driving a Mac Mini if I wasn't so much into using x86 assembly to code apps. (Maybe learning PPC asm would be the next logical step?) The Epia has exactly as much juice as you described meaning it gets the job done (programming mostly) but there's no room for gaming whatsoever. Currently that's an aid to the programming process, simply because there isn't all that much I can do on the system - but some extra processing power woudld still be nice.

Re:Mac Mini vs EPIA

[mbourgon]

Dublin - how well does Uwin work? I use cygwin, and so color me interested. I mostly build small shell scripts. Thanks.

Re:Mac Mini vs EPIA

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not true. I own a Dell Inspiron 8100, and I've burned two IBM drives because of continuous usage. Now I'm using the laptop with more care, powering it off at nights and using it as less as possible, and things changed, it even sounds much better...

Re:Mac Mini vs EPIA

[hey!]

Well, a fair number of people have, literally, been struck twice by lightning. Of course, the people who this happens to are ususally people who spend a lot of time outdoors -- rangers and the like. Maybe the Inspirion design is flawed, or maybe you're just not lucky.

I've been using laptops for over ten years as my primary machine. On most of my machines, when I give them up the lettering on the keyboard has been worn off. But I've never had a hard disk go bad. Filesystems problems -- plenty. Hardware issues -- never.

Re:Mac Mini vs EPIA

[Anonymous Coward]

the poor quality of dell inspirons is well known. almost manages to make apple's crappy ibooks look reliable. and that takes real effort.

mod do3n

[Anonymous Coward]

ultimatEly, we Slashdot's

An audio workstation

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

LinuxBios

[Effugas]

The real question is--

Can I run LinuxBios on this? If so, where can I buy one pre-loaded?

Re:LinuxBios

[Anonymous Coward]

"The current favorite platforms are VIA EPIA, EPIA-M..."

http://www.linuxbios.org/news/

Nothing beats this bad boy

[melted]

http://www.newegg.com/app/viewproductdesc.asp?DEPA =0&description=56-110-030&ATT=Barebone+Systems&CMP =KNC-goog13

I'm not related to Newegg in any way. I just run one of these at home as file/web/dhcp server, and I think it's freakin' insane that you can buy this kind of barebone so cheap. Add HDD and RAM and you're good to go.

Re:Nothing beats this bad boy

[Anonymous Coward]

You can get an EPIA mini-itx board with the same C3 800mhz cpu for under 100$.

Re:Nothing beats this bad boy

[Anonymous Coward]

You can get an EPIA mini-itx board with the same C3 800mhz cpu for under 100$.

But the ASUS system also includes case, power supply, CD drive, and floppy for $112.

Re:Nothing beats this bad boy

[Grishnakh]

It's way too big. It's like a shortened mini-tower.

I wish someone made a barebones system with a really small case (like the Casetronics Travlas) for a price like this. I don't want any 5.25" or 3.5" slots at all; just a slot for a laptop drive at the most. I want to build a system to put in my car, but the cost of the cases suitable for this purpose is extremely high. I also want to build a small diskless HTPC to run MythTV on (with the encoding being done on my main computer), but again the cases suitable are very expensive.

Re:Nothing beats this bad boy

[bobbozzo]

You should be able to find lots of small cases on mini-itx.com

Regardless, this company's Neo series
http://www.lex.com.tw:8080/home.htm
are very small (notebook HD only, no CD or other drive bays).
IIRC, they're under $400 with motherboard, CPU, case, and PS.

You're right....blunt....but absolutely right.

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe it's time to get some editors who actually give a crap?

Re: proscribed mac minis...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, he used the word correctly, then.

What a coincidence

[Anonymous Coward]

What an amazing coincidence that someone named "Nehemiah" is an EPIA enthusiast. *cough*astroturf*cough* Perhaps I, the one and only true Anonymous Coward, should submit "news" stories about Anonymizer.

fanless power supplies

[cout]

I believe the power supply in my mini-itx case is a 65W unit and is fanless. It looks not unlike a laptop power supply. IIRC the case is a Morex Cubid (not to be confused with the Cubit).

Mini-ITX (and ATX!) with no fans

[unixj]

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.

Re:Mini-ITX (and ATX!) with no fans

[cpghost]

Hush are much too expensive, IMHO. My EPIA board with fanless 12 V DC-DC converter and brick transformer is absolutely silent, and costs less than 400 bucks, including 512 MB RAM. It's not the fastest platform out there, but as a non-gaming desktop box, it's perfectly usable.

fanless agp

[bani]

try this one?

Re:fanless agp

[fishbowl]

Good lord. I need a 2-D desktop with no more than 1280x1024 resolution, to drive a program with no more requirements than, say, Cakewalk Sonar, and you show me a $300 video card?

Re:fanless agp

[bobbozzo]

No need to be so rude.

Get a $40 Trident or S3 or whatever they make nowadays.
Or get an old PCI card if you have a PCI slot free.

Also, I've seen lots of NVidia cards with dead fans that still work fine, at least for 2-D.
Get a GeForce4MX or something, and unplug the fan.

Appreciate The Effort Re:Mirror, mirror...

[Anonymous Coward]

But, like others have said (w/ troll-like manners), the next five pages would be very useful :)

Thanks for the effort though.

I'd rather a Epia DP review

[ozbird]

The Epia SP is okay, but it isn't exactly a big step up from its precedessors. The Epia DP is a far more interesting beast - dual processors extends the potential uses of these boards much further than a clock speed or chipset upgrade.

I'll also believe them when I see them: despite much fanfare, the Nano-ITX boards are still largely vapourware.

Unichrome and X.org

[Anonymous Coward]

a Unichrome (graphics) driver for Xfree86 (none for X.org yet, sadly :( )

I run unichrome and X.org on my EPIA-M, as of about 2 weeks ago.

Decent DVI Video

[MrGoodwrench]

Why can't they put a decent DVI Video output on one of these suckers. Whenever I'm looking to make a small, quiet box for someone, all the analog integrated video on these things have very low picture quality output. I mean you're already paying a price premium for the small form factor and all the associated power supplies, cases, slim drives, etc. Why not build in decent DVI video? I guess most people are really using these as HTPC's and are really only interested in the NTSC Video outs and MPEG performance, but I despise crappy unichrome video that gets fuzzy on anything over 1024x768.

Re:Decent DVI Video

[TeknoHog]

Good point. There are also notable quality differences with analogue VGA signals, as my EPIA-MII is notably blurry at 1280x1024 TFT, compared to an absolutely crisp picture from a Geforce2. I think with DVI even a "low quality" output would be better, as the pixels are addressed more or less separately.

Re:Decent DVI Video

[egghat]

Yepp strange. Same for nearly all "normal" mainboards with integrated graphics. You'll pay some extra bucks for integrated graphics and end up buying a dvi-enabled card for 45 dollars nevertheless.

The new Pentium-M based mainboard from AOpen is a positive exception. I think, I'll wait for this one.

Or buy a Mac Mini instead. Quiet. Fast. With DVI (not the first time, that Apple shows the PC makers how to build a sensible PC).

Bye egghat.

sorry to be offtopic

[sakura the mc]

but has anyone know how/tried to silence a dual opteron box?

someone said earlier in the comments that if you had a big enough heatsink, you could make any system fanless.

anyone know of any fanless solutions for opterons?

Re:sorry to be offtopic

[Anonymous Coward]

but has anyone know how/tried to silence a dual opteron box?
someone said earlier in the comments that if you had a big enough heatsink, you could make any system fanless.

Really big heatsinks.

Re:sorry to be offtopic

[sakura the mc]

hey thx

WTFP ? price

[Anonymous Coward]

What is the price of the motherboard?

Did they lower the prices of the older motherboards to way below $100?

Did they figure out that cost of a decent looking case ($200+) is preventing many people from adopting the via mini-itx motherboards as entertainment room computers?

I priced a myth tv setup and found that the case pushed the total cost over $600.00. That went beyond the budget.

EpiOS download?

[TeknoHog]

It seems the beta is only available to a limited number of testers, which IMHO goes against the idea of opensource. So can anyone provide a torrent?

Re:EpiOS download?

[Anonymous Coward]

sorry but it is still only available for betatesters, which is IMHO not against any idea of open source ;)

-1 Flamebait

[jargoone]

He gave you a link to a product that satisfies all of the requirements you listed initially: a fanless AGP video card. It's not his fault you were vague.

Still no cpufreq support?

[chandoni]

As of kernel 2.6.11, there is STILL no working cpufreq (longhaul) CPU throttling support for epia boards. The latest status is discussed here There is also no ACPI control of the fans; they're always on and not under software control (this would be a problem under any OS).

Although the boards are marketed towards users who build machines that are always left on, they skimped on some obvious features needed by most users in this market.

Server of Epiacenter.com up and running

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry guys, we just don't know why the server closed immediatly after this news.
Maybe a problem with the bandwith, cause the RAM status was ok and the cpu was idle @ 95%. ;(