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Via Debuts Smallest PC Mobo Format Yet

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Via is readying a media-oriented motherboard in what could be the next popular size for small form-factor PCs: Pico-ITX. The 'Epia PX' board measures 3.9 x 2.8 inches and features a 1GHz C7 processor, along with rich audio/video I/O, albeit mostly on pin headers. Pico-ITX measures 3.9 x 2.8 inches (10 x 7.2 cm) — exactly half the surface area of Via's already small 4.7 x 4.7-inch (12 x 12cm) Nano-ITX standard, and considerably smaller than the original 6.7-inch square (17 x 17cm) mini-ITX standard."

3 of 159 comments (clear)

  1. Vapourware by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    VIA have a nasty habit of announcing technology, and not shipping it. Look at the NTX format. They announced it, and for the next several years you just could not buy them retail.

    If you are building OEM devices, they may sell to you - but there are other alternatives out there for mass production besides VIA.

    And to second another poster - there are always problems with the drivers. If they were building the same quality in a more conventional marketplace (ie desktop) people would put them in the same marketspace as many of the original 'all in one' boards and avoid them in droves.

    VIA - if you are serious - show it. If not just go blow away.

  2. Re:Via hw is excellent by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative
    Via just says things like, "well, try not to DMA much."

    I wish they did. For a high-tech project, we decided on embedding VIA Mini-ITX motherboards. The one we picked (pressured for lowest COGS) had a C3 and a VT8235 south bridge. We ran into very weird USB and PCI communication problems, and spent almost a man year in total on trying to fix our software. It turns out that the south bridge is the problem. On the VIA Arena forums, this turned out to be a known problem (google for "VT8235 lockup"), mostly apparent when generating heavy network traffic. The "driver fixes" for Windows turn out just to throttle the network traffic.

    Officially, our VIA representative still hasn't acknowlegded this problem, and we were ready to switch to a different, more "industrial" mobo. We still picked a VIA one though (with a C7 and a 8237) because frankly, their prices are hard to beat.

    If you are considering a VIA mobo for an embedded application, make sure you test, test, test and don't automatically blame the SW guys when you find something weird. Don't let the fact that this is "consumer electronics" fool you. We figured that this meant cheap, well-tested, large series hardware with ppm failure rates. Apparently, that's not always the case.

  3. Still not impressed by Tainek · · Score: 5, Interesting

    i have two problems with the VIA Mini Range

    1: Low Performance

    Even the 1.5 GHZ VIA Cores perform badly, only a nudge faster than a P3. there are other options, such as the pentium boards (see point 2) and an AMD socket 754 board (Why 754? , why not AMD2, even 939 just so we can use dual core!)

    2: Price
    These things cost a silly amount, here in the UK its about £90 entry for the pathetic 500mhz boards, and about £150 for a 1.5GHZ via. or you can pay £150 for a intel board, but still need to buy a proccessor

    And the nano ITX, well now those are ugly, for the cost of one of those i can get an xbox360...