Re: Via EPIA Mini-ITX motherboard

[Matthew Dillon <dillon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

    I promised to report back.

    Well, I decided to get a couple of these EPIA 5000's.  I first tried
    to get them from mini-itx.com but they emailed back and said they were
    overloaded and couldn't fullfill the order.  They also said they weren't
    happy with their US courier so I do not recommend using mini-itx (british
    based) if you are in the U.S.  But if you are a Brit or European,
    they may be a good choice.

    One additional thing to note, even though the mini-itx.com folks are
    great people, they use PayPal and PayPal is *FUCKED* when it comes
    to currency conversions.  When mini-itx.com tried to refund my 
    credit card for the full amount in british pounds PayPal didn't
    refund the full amount in US dollars (or get anywhere close even
    if one takes into account conversion rates), leaving me out $25.
    I had to open up a case with my credit card company.  But please note,
    this has no bearing on the mini-itx.com folks, I think they are 
    fine people.

    In anycase, they suggested that I try IDOT.COM.  Since I am trying
    to put together the cheapest, smallest system I can I started in
    their motherboards/cpus category and they had a nice bundle that came in
    quite cheap.  IDOT.COM (U.S. based) shipped the next day and I got
    the stuff the day after that.   I highly recommend them.  I ordered
    from this part of their web page:

    http://www.idot.com/TheStore/Peripheral/motherboard/default_itx.asp?Cate.id=5

    I clicked into the EPIA 5000, added suitable memory, and the ITX-PV Super Slim
    (includes AC power supply) plus adapters in case I want to add a slim HD or 
    CD in the future.  I am quite impressed by the unit.  My only complaint is that
    the one fan in the case, which is situated next to the power supply, is quite
    loud (unncessarily loud since I don't have a hard drive).  It's driving about
    10 times the air that is actually needed for the power supply :-).
    It looks like a simple matter to replace it with a slow fan, or possibly even
    remove it since I do not have a hard drive in the case.  Note: this particular case
    has no room for the PCI card, even with a riser.  I was going for small and figure
    I will use USB for any expansion.  It does have room for a laptop hardrive and
    a slimline CD.

    -

    So far I have successfully got the network up, though I am experiencing
    the same occcassional stalls with the VR driver for the ethernet that
    others are reporting.  My kernel is reporting it as a VIA VT6102
    Rhine II 10/100BaseTX device.

    I have successfully got X running.  X autodetected the TRIDENT driver
    for the cyberbladei1 chipset and works fine in 1024x768x24 (I haven't
    tried higher resolutions yet).  My quick 'xengine' test showed it to
    be about 1/3 the speed of my workstation (which has a GeForce2 in it).

    I did a simple /usr/bin/time sort /usr/share/dict/words test
    repeatedly (so its memory-only, no I/O).  The unit performs the task 
    in 2.64 realtime.  My 664 MHz Celeron performs the same task in 1.34
    seconds and my DELL 2550 (1.1 GHz P3) performs it in 0.58 seconds.
    Now, remember, this is the cheapest VIA micro-tx motherboard and cpu.
    It's a fanless cpu and pulls very little power, so it isn't meant to
    compete with its bigger cousins in pure performance.  I am quite
    impressed with its capabilities.  For example, I can run Mozilla
    on it just fine and it is fairly snappy.

    I have successfully booted the thing via the network, though I am
    getting random BTX faults in the middle of the boot sequence... but
    once it starts running the FreeBSD kernel everything is dandy.  I
    think, but I am not sure yet, that the Intel network boot is leaving
    interrupts enabled on the ethernet device and blowing up the loader.
    I am going to try to track that down.

    I have successfully attached USB devices, but I have *not* been able 
    to boot from either my sony disk-on-key or my simpletech compact-flash.
    The BIOS recognizes the USB device but it then locks up on the
    simpletech and ignores the Sony.  I still have some hope, it's very
    tantalizing.  I can use the USB once the kernel is booted, though,
    which is what matters most.  If anyone knows the secret please post!

    Overall I am quite impressed, this unit is useable for just about
    anything short of playing games.  The EPIA 5000 motherboards have
    two DIMM slots (PC/133 SDRAM) and can handle up to 512M sticks for
    1G of total memory.  I threw two 256M sticks in each of the two
    units I bought.  The cpu has enough suds for most applications
    (OpenOffice, Mozilla, web server, mail server, in-car/in-boat unit,
    etc) and has no problem maxing out a 100BaseT network over NFS.

    That is my report.

						-Matt


To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxx
with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message