Via Launches New Line of Mini-ITX Boards

An anonymous reader writes "LinuxDevices has the skinny on Via's next-generation Epia EN mini-ITX boards, which feature its relatively new C7 processors based on the Esther C5J core. The boards will be able to run passively cooled at 1.2GHz, and will clock up to 2GHz, with 800MHz FSBs." From the article: "They target thin clients, car PCs, robotics, medical equipment, kiosks, and server appliances."

Comments

What does passively cooled really mean?

[Profane MuthaFucka]

I've got a ME6000 board that isn't reliable unless there's some air flowing over the heatsink. This was supposedly passively cooled, but I had to add a little fan blowing right at the heatsink to get the temperatures down from 60C to about 38C.

It even overheated when it wasn't in the box.

Re:What does passively cooled really mean?

[Bradee-oh!]

I run a PD as my firewall/router/server. I suffered frequent hang problems and replaced the cheap power supply I was using with a known-good, better quality supply and haven't had a problem. This is running passively cooled. I've also had a few other Epia boards in the past. My experience says they are very picky on their voltages, but overheating likely isn't the problem.

Great, but will it support Virtualization?

[luckytroll]

This is a great platform, if you dont mind the slower speed of the C3/7 processors - but the thing that I have been a little miffed about is the unsupportability to run VMware - hopefully the C7 may fix this.

Re:Great, but will it support Virtualization?

[daniel23]

Hm, my Lan server is an Epia C3-800, running SuSE 8.2 (still). It runs VMware-2.0.4 and in it another SuSE which handles the (mostly harmless, unless I link my pr0n collection) http, ftp, ssh I get here. Both host and guest OS had their uptime wrap around last summer, so I'd argue it is an not entirely unstable setup.

Oh yes, and it doesnt overheat, either, in spite of me taking all the included fans out. It has a Morex Cubid 2677 case standing on its left side, thus having convection cooling.

What does hot product really mean?

[Anonymous Coward]

"It even overheated when it wasn't in the box."

Wow! Did it burst into flames on the store shelf?

Cool but...

[Life700MB]

Looks like a very cool home server, but it lacks a second network card, like the MacMini.


--
Superb hosting 20GB Storage, 1_TB_ bandwidth, ssh, $7.95

Re:Cool but...

[Ulrich Hobelmann]

Well, if you don't need a PCI card, you can probably use the PCI slot (I hope they have one!) for another networking card (unlike the Mac mini I'm sitting at).

I ran an Eden 533 for a while, and did just that...

Re:Cool but...

[marcelC]

The previous C3 "nehemiah" line of epia boards had a model with 2 ethernet ports on it. These should come out for this model as well.

PVR

[LordSnooty]

And of course they target living-room PVR devices, but with the brouhaha over broadcast flags, maybe it's understandable that they want to keep it quiet. Do it the easy way with Knoppmyth

Re:PVR

[idonthack]

My dad uses some mobos like this for our Myth setup, with 1GHz processors and hardware mpeg decoding. They've got fans but they run really quiet, especially without harddrives. He had another fanless 600MHz one, but it was too slow to use as a Myth client. These faster ones will be great for the same purpose.

Re:PVR

[BooRadley]

This is for your dad:

Here's to you, Mr. "I have a kid old enough to post intelligently on Slashdot, yet I'm still geeky enough to build out my own multi-head MythTV setup."

Re:PVR

[wings]

Thanks. :-)

A prototype Epia EN board (Click to enlarge)

[urban_gorilla]

no thanks. thats the whole point.

Hardware Specs

[slick_rick]

I would have bought an EPIA years ago if VIA would open up the specs a bit more. Google around about people getting linux going on these. It is an easy thing to do, as long as you don't want to have everything on the board work (like the SVideo out, the onboard MPEG2 decoder, etc) . It can work from what I understand, just not something I wanted to spend a week trying.

So is the new line any better? If so I'd buy as I'm in the market for 2 or 3 machines like this. Question is, does VIA even care about the Linux user? Until now the answer has been no.

Not too exciting

[jandrese]

From the looks of it, they're just releasing a chip that is 40% less of a dog than the existing chip. Still not that great. It is a bit more power efficent than a Pentium-M, but you really pay for that in the performance. Not a terribly exciting chip IMHO, but one that will probably find some use in set-top appliances and the like.

Re:How about homemade routers?

[michrech]

For SOHO, do you *really* need 2ghz for web server, router, storage, etc?

1.2ghz ought to be fine for that, which is what they claim it will run while being passively cooled.

Minus the vpn tunnels, I ran a web/mail/storage/router/firewall server, under linux, on a P3550mhz. I'm sure the VPN tunnels wouldn't require THAT much CPU time...

No drivers for CarPC stuff

[scsirob]

VIA so far has ignored all begging owners of other MiniITX boards to release Windows drivers that can run 800x480 resolution. This is the native resolution of nearly all 7" wide-screen displays, very popular with Car PC builders.

I sincerly hope VIA will listen this time and release a driver that fits the requests of all these CarPC project owners.

Also, there's been a MiniITX board with 12V-only power input. Unfortunately the 12V must be within +/- 5%, making it again unsuitable for Car PC usage. Why can't they release a board with wide voltage input (7V - 28V), and if at all possible with a built-in shutdown controller??

Re:No drivers for CarPC stuff

[hackstraw]

I know I'll get moderated as a troll again because I suggest using Linux over Windows, but

Modeline "800x480" 40 800 864 928 1088 480 481 484 509 +hsync

Will do the trick for X. No drivers necessary.

Re:No drivers for CarPC stuff

[essdodson]

Besides being a troll, It's also my understanding that many of the apps car pc users enjoy aren't available in Linux nor are similar replacements. Specificly in the area of map applications that tie into GPS.

Re:How about homemade routers?

[Not_Wiggins]

If these things are quiet AND efficient they might really have something there, although 2 GHz for a router seems excessive.

Exactly correct: 2G is excessive for a router. However, if it can be passively cooled at 2G (well, the article states passively cooled at 1.2G), then it should be very cool when it is underclocked to run at a speed adequate to handle router-specific tasks. Just because the power is there doesn't mean you need to utilize it all; underclocking* is great in situations where cooling is an issue.

* - When available. Depends on if there are frequency locks on the MB and/or processor.

Multicore C7 = x86 Niagara?

[Hal_Porter]

Via have been making small, cheap, low power cores for some time, whilse Intel and AMD moved to large, expensive high power one.

Now there's a move to multi core designs and blade servers, and even the slowest x86 server is probably over powered for a server, you have to wonder if they could do an x86 version of Niagara

From here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VIA_C7

"You can also see a quad-core C7, could be manufactured for the same cost as a single core P4 on 90 nm process."

Now Niagara is 8 core and each core has four threads admittedly, but there's something to be said for a four way x86 chip for blades. The power consumption wouldn't be too bad either. But you can have four C7 cores per P4 core. If I were AMD for example, I'd be playing around with an x86 Niagara.

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.arch/msg/991ff 1390b277b98?hl=en&

Hmm, and I'd find (or invent) some new benchmarks too.

Personally

[hey!]

I'm much more interested in what happens when you hold the processing power constant and drop the price, as the price performance ratio drops.

I understand that it's not attractive for a company to look at lower margin items, but imagine if you could retail something like the original mini ITX boards in the price range of, say, $50 (it's currently about $110). Every garage inventor in the country would be creating new embedded computing applications.

I love the silence

[Anonymous Coward]

Got 3 of these now, a Nehemia and 2 Edens (566 and 800MHz fanless). I use them for making music and editing sound.
Even though they are not amazingly powerful I would never go back to some huge whirring pizza oven. No hard drives either, all boot from 4G IDE flash drives, one with a modified Dynebolic/Puppy linux crossbreed and the other I usually boot DSL (Damn small = fits on a 512M USB thumbdrive) Not a single moving part in the room! (unless you include me, and I don;t move much) All the sound files are on my file server in another part of the building.

ah, more via pain

[Blymie]

I have had, and know so many Linux users that have had, problem with VIA chipsets. DMA issues, issues with lockups, VIA unwilling to communicate with Linux developers on resolving them.

Most recently an Asus board I owned last year, locked up as solid as a monkey if any heavy DMA activity occured. Worse, after doing hours of Google searches, I managed to find info stating that Windows drivers disabled various chip functions, so that the chipset could run in a stable function.

Apparently, from the slant of posts that I read, it was taken as fact that VIA often had issues with chipsets, and merely patched those issues with drivers. Typically, one buying a VIA board in Windows would end up with degradation of their chipset via drivers. Linux users were, however, not so lucky. VIA would ignore all pleas and requests about issues with their chipset, and the belief was that they did not want such issues with their chips to "make it to the press". Acknowledging that they had reduced chipset performance with drivers, would obviously not go over well. Chipsets are marketed to certain specs, and using drivers to "make it work", but not deliver those specs is clearly opening liability.

After reading this, I looked at issues I'd had over the years with graphic cards causing hardware lockups, boxes that would randomly reboot and the like. In almost all cases it tended to be with system that contained VIA chipsets. Further, I also found posts from many Myth users, complaining about DMA issues with their mini-itx boards.

VIA? I'd recommened everyone stay away.... I sure the heck do! Time isn't worth the $20 you save by walking away from an Intel or SiS chipset. Sure, these chipsets have issues, but Intel and SiS both seem a little more talkative with Linux developers.. and tend to produce a better product. VIA seems produce these flaws in almost _all_ of their chipsets.

My experience, sure. You'll have to make up your own mind. All I know is that $20 in savings is peanuts over 20 hours of debugging.. when the debugging is a useless task.

Re:ah, more via pain

[proxima]

VIA? I'd recommened everyone stay away.... I sure the heck do! Time isn't worth the $20 you save by walking away from an Intel or SiS chipset. Sure, these chipsets have issues, but Intel and SiS both seem a little more talkative with Linux developers.. and tend to produce a better product. VIA seems produce these flaws in almost _all_ of their chipsets.

My experience, sure. You'll have to make up your own mind.

Not that anecdotes are all that meaningful to others, but I've had relatively good luck with VIA chipsets. Since I've had AMD processors in my last three motherboards, Intel was not an option. I haven't heard good things about SiS in general, but that was a while ago. NVIDIA is the newcomer, but to get some mb features working you need proprietary drivers (annoying enough for things like video, but I'm not interested in it for good chipset functionality).

Of four motherboards (an Epox and Abit built with KT133 chipset, and an Asus with a KT400 chipset, and a brand I don't remember with an old K6-2 450 Mhz cpu), two are still running (the Epox and the Asus). The other two experienced slow deaths (worked great for years, slowly became unstable), which I largely attribute to some improper venting of the towers causing heat damage.

In my experience, as a Linux user, it's best to seek out a chipset that is reported to work well with Linux. Then find a motherboard brand you trust. At this point all I'll go with is Asus (my experience with motherboards goes beyond my personal computers, and while I used to think Abit and Asus were equal in quality, I don't think Abit is as good anymore). I had to RMA two motherboards (with KT133 chipsets), before getting the Epox. I can't blame the chipset, though (unless there are serious quality differences in the way the chips themselves are manufactured, but I doubt it), since I've used KT133 with great luck for years since then. So while my percentages might not look great, the lesson here I think is that the motherboard manufacturer plays a more important role.

VIA, Intel, NVIDIA, SiS, whatever, you can probably find a particular chipset from each company that is reported to be stable with your operating system of choice. Once you've chosen that, don't skimp on the cost of the motherboard (and the cooling), and your experience should be a good one.

Re:ah, more via pain

[Malor]

The KT133 was terrible. You must not work your computers very hard. The KT133 was a disaster in all respects, and it gave the early Athlons an undeserved bad name. The CPUs were excellent, but the boards were complete shit, no matter who made them. A quick search on Google for KT133 problems shows NINETY THOUSAND hits.

The KT266 and 333 were pretty good as Windows desktops. But I'm using one as a Linux server now, and it's... not great. I have to run it with APIC disabled. Turning on APIC (in recent 2.6 kernels) causes all kinds of problems with software RAID. And I don't get very good throughput; using an Intel gigabit network adapter, I'm lucky to push 150 megabits onto a (very fast) SCSI array. And that's with no other load _at all_. Even pulling or pushing to a tmpfs, the absolute best I can manage is about 200Mb. In theory, I ought to be able to get north of 300 on vanilla PCI, but the chipset doesn't seem to have very good throughput. (this is without jumbo frames, but with a lot of other optimizations on the Linux side; I get similar results from both Windows and Mac gigabit clients.)

NVidia chipsets are pretty good, with the exception of their IDE and Ethernet drivers. The most recent Ethernet drivers instantly bluescreen my DFI Lanparty NF3 250 machine. The older version works, but you have to disable all TCP offloading and firewalling for full stability. WoW in particular does _not_ like offloading. And the IDE driver is slow and buggy... it's best to stick with standard Windows drivers.

That sounds pretty damning, but it's really quite good, other than that. But keep in mind I've only run this board with Windows. The KT333 I mention above worked fine in Windows too, but isn't so hot in Linux.

Intel may be behind in the CPU department, but their chipsets remain the best...extremely solid. In the high end, the NForce4 Professional on Opterons is supposedly good... but for low- to mid-range servers, where I won't be around to check on a system regularly, I'd much rather do Intel.

Then again, I have a personal Intel server with an 865 chipset that's hosted somewhere in Texas. It kernel panics randomly on every version of 2.6.15 I've tried, but is absolutely solid on 2.6.14 and earlier.

Even Intel hardware is no panacea against the crappy 2.6 kernel development process.

Re:ah, more via pain

[proxima]

The KT133 was terrible. [...] A quick search on Google for KT133 problems shows NINETY THOUSAND hits.

The KT133 was immensely popular, as I recall. It's no surprise that lots of people report problems with it. On the other hand, I didn't say that the KT133 was particularly great, just that it was stable for me (while using it as an example of how the quality of the motherboard manufacturer seemed to matter a great deal). I leave beating the heck out of chipsets for review websites, which then form a decent basis of my purchases (at least since the KT400). Performance? It wasn't high on my priority list.

I don't recall noticing huge performance differences in benchmarks of articles I read, but I could certainly be mistaken. I would still take a decent performance hit if it meant greater stability (which is why I stay far away from overclocking). I tend to buy the low end (but good quality) of what's available at that time, and upgrade more often (I think it provides more consistent relative performance at a good value).

Overall, I'd jump at an Intel chipset, since Linux support is probably most consistently good there. But when the AMD options are just so much more appealing, you're left with VIA, SiS, and NVIDIA (roughly speaking), and I still have no compelling reason to move off of VIA.

Re:How about homemade routers?

[ivan256]

There are *plenty* of "SOHO" routers for hackers. Linksys were always jut the "crappy but well marketed" ones. Lots of Netgear and ZyXel routers are plenty hackable, run linux, use the same processors as the linksys routers, have more features, and are signifigantly cheaper.

Release yourself from the grip of the Linksys fanboys.

DVI

[yet another coward]

I am disappointed to see the persistence of VGA rather than DVI. According to the page, an LVDS/DVI module will be available. All the tiny LCDs should move to the digital world, too. It would make them a little smaller and cooler.

When's the actual release?

[palfrey]

Given VIA's history of "rapid with press releases, incredibly slow with actual boards" (NanoITX anyone?), any bets on how long before we see available boards? I'm betting mid-2007 personally...

Re:How about homemade routers?

[questionlp]

It may not be a retail product, but you can always get a Soekris kit that has multiple Ethernet interfaces, 128 or 256MB of RAM and supports CF for additional storage for around $300 (net4801-50, 128MB version, with a total of 5 Ethernet interfaces).

http://www.soekris.com/net4801.htm

It runs off of a 586-class processor and with all of the fixins, would only draw around 20-25W. Not bad for something that can run Linux or *BSD. I haven't messed with one yet, but they do look pretty good even for a small server that can provide: SSH, FTP, web, NTP, DNS, DHCP, etc. Heck, it may replace my Sun Blade 100 one of these days ;)

too slow to boot

[tota]

I've toyed with these boards on more than one occasion for fun and profit, and the thing that really prevents you from using them in the embedded space is the amount of time it takes to boot the bloody thing.
Around 30s at the best of times to get to a shell with init=/bin/bash and only a little less if you use the linux bios. Disappointing to say the least, no decent set-top box can take more than 5, maybe 10 seconds to start.
Even using suspend to boot directly into a running system is not going to help since most of this time is going to be spent in the bios.

Not to mention that some boards come with a compact flash, but you can't boot from it! What's the f... point?

Thin clients

[Anonymous Coward]

"They target thin clients.."

What about those of us who aren't so thin? Have they had problems with the not so thin using their boards?

Re:Why IDE?

[Bertie]

Have you tried installing Windows XP on a computer with an SATA hard drive? Oh man. Pain. You actually have to kick the thing into life using drivers loaded off a FLOPPY DISK. Or at least, you did the last time I tried it. I bought all these shiny new components and had to borrow a floppy drive to get it running! In the end, I binned it and went Gentoo instead.

That would explain to me why these machines don't go SATA yet - most people are building their own systems with them, I'd imagine.

Re:How about homemade routers?

[TopSpin]

that has multiple Ethernet interfaces

I'd have bought several Epia boards by now if they had just put a useful number of Ethernet ports on board. Their 2-port boards look like one-offs and do not inspire. I want a board with 3 ports. If you're going to talk about "server appliance" you need 2+ network ports... Yet, from the photos I see here their latest stuff has

wait for it

1 port.

Sigh.

...and no

[phorm]

And as somebody who had to jump through a whole lot of hoops over time to make them work. I'd have to say that the return answer is "sorta."

Yes, there were Epia drivers. They also tended towards bugginess and being a royal pain in the ass to install. Not to mention that the installer was specific for various distributions but nothing debian-based... much to my annoyance.

VIA released source

[metamatic]

VIA released source for all the hardware on the M10000. It's gradually being cleaned up and integrated into Linux. For example, 2.6 currently supports the hardware RNG and hardware accelerated X11, and the MPEG hardware is supported in mplayer. Sensors work, ethernet works, Firewire and USB work, all with open source drivers. They do a much better job than most other vendors at supporting Linux.

(If you know of a motherboard with SATA that'll take a CPU that can be passively cooled and has open source drivers for everything, I'd like to hear about it, as I plan to build a bigger server this year.)

Re:Not just the boards...

[kfg]

. . .you could build your own case... however, that requires a whole mess of tools and costs and time too.

And who really wants to be an inventor if it means having to deal with a whole mess of tools and building shit, like . . .a box.

Maybe they just don't make inventors and engineers like they used to, but we used to be able to handle making a tin box pretty good.

KFG

No floppy req'd for my Win install on no-RAID SATA

[MojoStan]

Have you tried installing Windows XP on a computer with an SATA hard drive? Oh man. Pain. You actually have to kick the thing into life using drivers loaded off a FLOPPY DISK.

I have installed WinXP and Win2000 on SATA drives (without RAID), and a floppy disk was not required. The floppy install method might still be required to install Windows on SATA RAID (I haven't tried it), which would suck. But from my experience (with Intel motherboards) a floppy is NOT required for installing Windows XP/2000 on a SATA hard disk because (from my experience) the motherboard BIOS settings (not a Windows driver) determines whether you can boot/install Windows on a SATA drive.

Some nForce motherboards I've seen have SATA RAID mode enabled in the BIOS by default, which might require a floppy. One motherboard I installed Windows XP on, the Intel D915GUX, had the SATA boot option disabled by default in the BIOS. After enabling SATA boot and choosing SATA mode without RAID, WinXP w/SP2 installed without a problem.

Maybe SP2 needs to be on the installation CD, but I doubt it because I'm pretty sure I installed Win2000 w/SP4 on a SATA drive (Intel D945GT motherboard) without using a floppy (this was a while ago).

Yes I have

[Andy Dodd]

Gentoo 2005.1 installed with no problems on the SATA-based Dell PowerEdge 850 (or was it 830???) I set up for him.

Same with my SATA-based Athlon X2 server.

Gentoo 2006.0 was flawless on my new Inspiron E1705.

proper passive cooling

[r00t]

Choose a heat sink with a thick base and widely spaced fins that all run the same direction. The fins should be about 1/4 inch apart. Do not orient the fins or CPU horizontally. Air should be able to rise (hot air rises) through the fins from bottom to top without being blocked by components above or below. As always, a massive copper heatsink is best.

Guide the air. There should be a smooth tube running from the bottom of the PC to the top of the PC, with the heat sink embedded in the middle. The heat sink fills the tube, and is not open except to the tube. Continue the tube up and out of the top of the PC as a chimney, going up at least 1 foot. The bottom of the PC, where the lower end of the tube is open, needs to be lifted off your desk or floor. Air flow needs to be directed vertically but otherwise very free of restrictions.

Price? What's the price? Anybody know the price?

[Qbertino]

Price.

function checkOutCheapAndSmallComp()
{
  if (newMiniITXLine.notablyCheaperThan(MacMini))
  {
  return interesting = true;
  } else {
  return pointless = utterly;
  }
}

Since the MacMini all the small component, low power PC solutions have missed out. Only if MiniITX board and CPU+casing+powersupply+drive+ram+hdd is cheaper than the MacMini, only then will it stand a chance.