VIA's 21W Mini-ITX motherboard

Post by **CA_Steve** » Tue Mar 21, 2006 1:43 pm

qviri · Post by **qviri** » Tue Mar 21, 2006 2:03 pm

VIA Technologies says its EPIA EN-Series Mini-ITX mainboard is in production, and is available in limited quantities through authorized distributors.

So... what else is new, VIA?

How about the plethora those wonderful C7-M ultraportables available on the market right now, too.

defaultluser · Post by **defaultluser** » Wed Mar 22, 2006 8:53 pm

Ahh, but want to see what the C7 1.5 GHz buys you?

Have a look here.

You can read my post in the thread, but I will repeat it here: The C7 is no silver bullet for Via. It is a new rev of Nehemiah with double the L2 cache, a better bus interface, and SSE2.

It doesn't change the fact that Nehemiah, like every Winchip ever built, only has a single integer pipeline, and a single floating point pipeline. Thus, as you might expect, the chip trails a Pentium 3 (2 INT, 2 FP) by about half, clock-for-clock. The improved bus and cache helped a little, nothing more.

Low power is nice, but what use is it if the performance sucks? Unless you need the size, or the convenience of an all-in-one platform, this is a waste of money. Any Athlon 64 can be undervolted / underclocked, and have better performance, and lower power, for less.

jaganath · Post by **jaganath** » Thu Mar 23, 2006 3:36 am

Low power is nice, but what use is it if the performance sucks? Unless you need the size, or the convenience of an all-in-one platform, this is a waste of money. Any Athlon 64 can be undervolted / underclocked, and have better performance, and lower power, for less.

Totally agree. For a long time there was a huge gap in the market for somone to come out with low-power, high-performance chips, and VIA missed their opportunity, AMD and Intel have now beaten them to it. What do VIA offer that you can't get anywhere else? The boards are small? Not that much smaller than micro-ATX, and with many more limitations than a micro-ATX board. The chips don't put out much heat? Undervolted Semprons, Athlons and Geodes easily match the heat output, and beat them on performance. I'm hard-pressed to think of a single reason why you would buy one of these rather than a better, cheaper AMD or Intel-based solution.

Tibors · Post by **Tibors** » Thu Mar 23, 2006 7:04 pm

What many of the "specialists" on SPCR tend to forget is that the VIA solutions are a known working, drop-in, no tweaking needed solution that simply works. On the other hand there are plenty of threads on these forums asking for micro-ATX mobo's with integrated VGA that are undervoltable in the BIOS, but the answers are few. This would not be an obstacle for me or those "specialists", but there are way more people out there that have only just enough IT knowledge to assemble a system. I would advise them to go with a VIA system over an undervolted Sempron. If you don't go for second hand, then any low power Intel solution will end up more expensive than a VIA Mini-ITX board.

Besides it is nice that an undervolted Sempron has better benchmark scores, but so what? If a VIA C3 of C7 is fast enough and a Sempron is ? times faster, then that just means that they are both fast enough.

mb2 · Post by **mb2** » Thu Mar 23, 2006 11:15 pm

the thing is..
there are plenty of undervoltable in bios (or windows) micro-atx motherboards with onboard graphics for s754. now the t-force mobos are out. there may be threads about them.. but they are getting answered

.
that was (and still is, even more) the case for Socket A (altough even then we had the biostar M7NCG-400). u'll get much better graphics than the via too aswell as more processing power, more expansion slots, and usually more onboard features.. so IMO its much easier than using a 'rare' via. u need a less common psu/case combination too running a via (unless u want to run in a m-atx case or atx(!?!).
suitable 754 motherboards are far more widespead-ly available than via(cpu) mobos/CPUs.

there is *one* advantage to the vias.. in that the mobos are tiny!.. its a very significant size difference to mATX IMO.
whyy does nobody make a mini-ITX s754/939 board??
and i (am lead to) believe that completely fanless is a via area.. which no-one seems to want to do with their sempron..

and if u dont need CPU power.. get a mid/low PIII, or a Cel III. much cheaper!.

jaganath · Post by **jaganath** » Fri Mar 24, 2006 1:59 am

whyy does nobody make a mini-ITX s754/939 board??

Albatron KI51PV- NForce4 mini-ITX S754 board

qviri · Post by **qviri** » Fri Mar 24, 2006 4:28 am

Tibors wrote:What many of the "specialists" on SPCR tend to forget is that the VIA solutions are a known working, drop-in, no tweaking needed solution that simply works. On the other hand there are plenty of threads on these forums asking for micro-ATX mobo's with integrated VGA that are undervoltable in the BIOS, but the answers are few. This would not be an obstacle for me or those "specialists", but there are way more people out there that have only just enough IT knowledge to assemble a system. I would advise them to go with a VIA system over an undervolted Sempron. If you don't go for second hand, then any low power Intel solution will end up more expensive than a VIA Mini-ITX board.

Besides it is nice that an undervolted Sempron has better benchmark scores, but so what? If a VIA C3 of C7 is fast enough and a Sempron is ? times faster, then that just means that they are both fast enough.

That is true. However, also note the current going prices. That article says $280 for the board. You have to add RAM, (since we're going with as little fans as possible) a DC/DC converter and a power brick, a case that doesn't use 60mm fans, etc. It may well be that a mac mini would end up close in price to a VIA box put together -- and it comes already assembled.

I seem to recall one of the benefits of the C7 was supposed to be its cheap price, due to its simple design (?). $280 isn't really cheap, even for everything integrated.

So, anything AMD is a better choice for us SPCRers. I'd say that a mac mini is just as good, if not a better choice for the ordinary people out there.

mb2 · Post by **mb2** » Fri Mar 24, 2006 7:39 am

jaganath wrote:Albatron KI51PV- NForce4 mini-ITX S754 board

wow

its better than my board!.. as of now, all i would lose is one PCI slot! any idea of availability or pricing?.. i want oneeee. i wonder if it OCs

there is a 939 version too i guess?

..if only they made decent cheap miniITX cases..

Tibors · Post by **Tibors** » Fri Mar 24, 2006 9:57 am

qviri wrote:That is true. However, also note the current going prices. That article says $280 for the board. You have to add RAM, (since we're going with as little fans as possible) a DC/DC converter and a power brick, a case that doesn't use 60mm fans, etc.

<sarcasm>Of course all those things are free if you buy a micro-ATX board.</sarcasm> I just looked at a Biostar board plus cheapest Sempron and a big cooler at one of my preferred supliers. I found a price of €236.

B.T.W. I've never used case fans in any of the mini-ITX systems I've build.