VIA Epia M10000 Mini-ITX Motherboard

Reviews: Hardware

Motherboards | Power Supplies | Memory | Systems | Video Cards

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Brian Kristensen
Kurtis
VIA
Oct. 10, 2003

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Introduction & History

VIA is a very well known company for their motherboards and chipsets. A while back, we took a look at the DFI Lan Party KT400a which featured VIA's KT400a chipset. While VIA hasn't always been on top of the competition, they do produce some very interesting and worth while products. One of their latest ventures is their series of Mini-ITX motherboards which fit almost an entire computer (CPU, RAM, VGA, Audio, Ethernet) onto a single 17x17 cm board. Besides the insanely small size of the mITX boards is the insanely low power consumption of the board which can run off of a small fanless 60 watt power supply (with low power optical and hard drives). Today we will be looking at the feature-packed VIA Epia M10000 motherboard which features VIA's latest Nehemiah core clocked at 1 GHz.

Mini-ITX History in Brief (Very Brief!)

Mini-ITX is an extremely small form factor designed by VIA, which was aimed towards being an embedded, low power motherboard. It all goes back to Cebit '01, where VIA introduced a reference design of the ITX form factor which was a mere 215x191 mm. It never caught on, and manufacturers instead used the FlexATX form factor at 229x191mm.

After creating a new motherboard division focused on small, powerful embedded systems, VIA introduced the Mini ITX form factor with an unheard of size of 170x170 mm. The mITX form factor caught on after some very positive responses, resulting in VIA's introduction of the EPIA line of motherboards which used VIA's low power C3 Erza CPU aimed towards media and office applications and started at speeds of 533 MHz.

The EPIA motherboards gained popularity and VIA realized the need for better media playback. VIA implemented better MPEG2 decoding, 5.1 audio, and more into the new EPIA "M" series of motherboards which utilized the C3 Erza T and started at 600 MHz. VIA later introduced the C3 Erza T at a speed of 1.0 GHz which was followed by a completely redesigned C3 dubbed "Nehemiah" at a clock speed of 1.0 GHz.

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Page 1: Introduction & History
Page 2: From Erza to Nehemiah
Page 3: Board Layout & Features
Page 4: Accessories
Page 5: BIOS
Page 6: Workstation & Office Performance
Page 7: Conclusion

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9 User Comments

1 - Posted by Kurtis on October 10, 2003 - 6:01 pm

i love that thing. can't wait to see what you do with it soon :)

2 - Posted by handrail on October 11, 2003 - 12:45 pm

yeah, put it in a dukes of hazzard lunchbox. that would be cool! i had this one when i was 7!!!!

http://www.cybermad.com/culture/wobble/duke1.gif

http://www.cybermad.com/culture/wobble/duke2.gif

3 - Posted by Kurtis on October 11, 2003 - 1:29 pm

lolol.

4 - Posted by A Person on October 25, 2003 - 2:16 am

Hey Brian, I got a question about the onboard video. I was reading a review of this board on another site http://www.techseekers.net/modules.php?name=Review... and they said that they could boot using the tv output but once the os loaded it switched back to vga. So they had to have a monitor around to switch back to tv. The thing that confused me was that they said, "Once I switched over to TV out, I could remove the monitor from now on." I was wondering if this meant that they could remove the monitor untill they rebooted or if they didnt need a monitor forever after that. Do know anything about this? (The peeps over there didn't respond to my email)

I am working on a project (in the planning stage) to build a pc inside of something portable, like a nintendo or a lunch-box or something cool so I can take it around to other peoples dorms and play old video games with emulators and watch dvds. I am gonna use an m1000 but if I have to have a monitor around everytime I boot then I'll have to buy a seperate vid card which will totaly change my plans.

Also, where did u get yours from? Or did u get it for free?

5 - Posted by Brian on October 25, 2003 - 11:09 am

Funny thing is, I don't have a TV. I'll see if I can snag one and test it out.

6 - Posted by Brian on October 25, 2003 - 11:34 am

To set up TV output, first attach a TV AND a Monitor and select "CRT+TV" in the BIOS and boot normally. Both screens will boot normally, but the TV will go blank once in Windows. (using your monitor) Go to the Display Properties (right click on desktop and click properties), go to the "Settings" tab, then "Advanced" then "S3Display. Then click on the TV icon/image and it should highlight in blue and tick the box below it. Click "OK" and the TV should display again.

Once you have done that, you should be able to shutdown, remove the monitor, and display with only the TV. I will test this out in a few days and keep you updated.

7 - Posted by A Person on October 25, 2003 - 2:14 pm

cool, thanks so much!!!

8 - Posted by ELiTE KiLLaH on October 25, 2003 - 10:28 pm

hopefully its just a one time thing...otherwise thats just fucking stpuid of them lol

:?

9 - Posted by A Person on October 25, 2003 - 11:30 pm

Ya, if its just a one time thing then I dont need any other video card and then I can stick some other fun stuff in it instead.

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