Patrick Schmid has no place writing of platforms!

[Crashman]

Conclusion - Is This The Beginning Of A New Generation Of PC Systems?

We'd say yes. We have deliberately avoided comparing the EPIA platform with a fully equipped PC in this article, as the expectations and technical requirements have very little in common. So, for the benchmarks, we restricted ourselves to practical tests and analyses.

What he's saying is that he won't admit the board stinks, and it is our duty as buyers to support this type of garbage.

He fails to remember the Cyrix Media GX platform, that had 3 slots, integrated everything, based on the AT form factor! According to his logic, that platform should have been a huge success! But there was a small problem, it sucked!

The Mini ITX form has only 1 slot. It's a PCI slot. No chance to get a good video card on it, and if you did, where would you put a modem, or tuner card, etc.

VIA wants you to believe this is an ideal solution for set top boxes. Ha ha, they did manage to fool some uninformed buyers.

This after his shameless promotion of the Mini-PC platform. Gee, and I used to think this was an enthusiast site. Why am I still here? Hopefully I'll be around a lot longer than loosers like Patric. I wonder if he plays the stock market...it would be handy for short selling to know his picks.

<font color=blue>Watts mean squat if you don't have quality!</font color=blue>

 

[FlyByPC]

I quite agree. Even before seeing the previous post, I was thinking to myself that this board seemed an awful <font color=red>(and I do mean awful!)</font color=red> lot like the MediaGX. The whole CPU-soldered-to-the-board thing was the clincher. It's not surprising at all that it only has one PCI slot; I guess the surprise is that it has one at all!

The ATX form factor won't be around forever -- nothing in the industry is -- but taking miniaturization to this extreme for a desktop machine is IMHO not the answer. Miniaturization is great in its place <font color=blue>(I use my iPaq all the time)</font color=blue>, but I believe most enthusiasts, and specifically most THG readers, would take a nice, fast, noisy Athlon any day over a slow, proprietary, nonupgradeable miniature PC. Especially if these new miniature PCs turn out to be as much of a <font color=red>reliability nightmare</font color=red> as the MediaGX machines did!

I guess this board -- if it's halfway reliable -- might make an acceptable office workstation for word processing, but trying to sell this to the average THG reader is a bit like trying to interest a muscle-car enthusiast in a Yugo.

 

[Crashman]

Hehe, I like your Yugo analogy. BTW, I once saw a Yugo on a tube chassis with a modified big block chevy sticking out of that tiny hole where the hood used to be!

The integration of reasonably good sound, LAN, and RAID on a board makes the mATX form factor far more attractive than it has ever been, but still doesn't make anything like the single slot VIA or even dual slot Flex ATX form factors seem logical to anyone who wants to keep their equipement current for more than a few days.

There are lots of other ways to miniaturize. AMD will be integrating the memory controller into the CPU soon. Well, AMD also has Hyper Transport. And Hyper Transport can support a PCI, PCI-X, or PCI-Express (3GIO) controller. So a good way to reduce cost and size of boards would be to put a Hyper Transport controller and Memory controller on the CPU. That would allow you to omit the Northbridge completely, using Hyper Transport to interface the south bridge. You don't even need an AGP controller from the northbridge since PCI-Express is actually faster than AGP8x. With Hyper Transport, a simple CPU and south bridge configuration would be ideal.

Wait, Hyper Transport is a STANDARD! If you put the southbridge on Hyper Transport, you would no longer have a need to stick with brand specific southbridges...you could choose an Intel, SiS, ALi, or god forbid, even VIA southbrige and use it with ANY CPU.

If you think about it, there really isn't a need to make a board this narrow right now. Not even in a car audio system. The greatest factor in car components is height, not width. Even an mATX board fits under the seat of most cars. What we really need for applications like that is the proliferation of half-height expansion cards.

<font color=blue>Watts mean squat if you don't have quality!</font color=blue>