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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."
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.
Profanity is the language all programmers know best.
>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.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.