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Review: VIA EPIA CN13000

by Ryszard Sommefeldt on 8 September 2006, 08:23

Tags: VIA Technologies (TPE:2388)

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Thoughts

It's clear that the VIA EPIA CN13000 moves the basic EPIA game on a fair bit in terms of performance. Clock-for-clock, Esther is quicker than Nehemiah (VIA C3) by useful margins and the use of DDR2 gives the CPU a decent amount of bandwidth to use. The IGP is competent, but only for basic 2D work and MPEG-2 decode. Playing games on UniChrome Pro is a total no-no, unless you're into games circa the turn of the century or so. Addition of a PCI graphics card is recommended though, for all things EPIA, if you can stomach the fact the addition graphics card will be more power hungry than the entire EPIA running at full tilt.

Speaking of power consumption, it must be reiterated that the EPIA without any PCI card in its slot pulls around 40W from the mains, full load. Taking into account PSU inefficiencies and the storage hardware, but including the 512MiB memory module, that's ~20W for the EPIA. Full load. Say hello to one of the big selling points for the thing.

And that brings us on to the reality of an EPIA purchase. You don't make one for graphics or CPU performance (in terms of speed), rather you make one for reasons of power consumption and size. Mini-ITX is quite the form factor and C7 and CN700 are quite the frugal performers, power consumption wise. Their outright speed is passable by well-configured Pentium III-based systems for chrissakes!

We mourn that CN-series EPIAs have no Compact Flash (or other flash media) controller for OS booting, but that's about all we miss in terms of features. The basic core componentry on the CN-series EPIAs is pretty much brilliant.

So, to sum up, for those that want a tiny low-power PC platform, for whatever reason, that runs standard x86 codes, then the EPIA sticks its neck out and shouts pretty loud, in a sea of Pentium-M platforms you could build yourself in a similar space. Recommended if you absolutely know you need one and where you understand the caveats of performance, but pretty damn odd for pretty much anyone building a small PC, given how it performs.

HEXUS Awards

We award it our media innovation prize for its perf/watt stats when acting as the backbone to a media player system.

Media Innovation
VIA EPIA CN13000


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Posted by afraser2k - Fri 08 Sep 2006 09:55
Nice review of the board, seems to be a suitable htpc option. Do you know what kind of support the current Mini-ITX cases will have for it or will we have to wait for new ones?

Did you get to try any hard disk performance benchmarks on the board due to the time you had with it, if anyone wanted to use it as a basis for a server?
Posted by Sim0n - Fri 08 Sep 2006 10:38
Great review, but theres a few things you didnt attempt, which for the board and its application (MCE mainly) i would of hoped.

Did you try this in MCE with various codec's to see if playback was smooth, and at what resolutions ?

And do you have any links to people selling this board..
Posted by afraser2k - Fri 08 Sep 2006 11:05
I eventually found it at http://www.mini-itx.com for £128 inc.VAT. Link also answers my own question about case support. :)
Posted by wombat - Fri 08 Sep 2006 12:46
Nice little review, only thing that I'd like to have seen tested is whether the cpu has enough oomph to be able to record tv, preferably with something like a cheap little USB digital tv stick.

I've always liked the idea of a nice cheap mini box that can be left running in the background without sucking much power. Something that can be left on for skype calls (could ditch the telephone line then) and a spot of browsing etc. and double up for recording purposes. Only trouble is a decent hard drive based dvd recorder can be had for less than £200 quid nowadays so the appeal has diminished a little.

Still mull over the idea once in a while, price would have to be right though, which immediatley rules out the hideously expensive mobile pentium. What I would like to see on your testbed is that nice little Foxconn socket 754 miniITX that was shown, though I am starting to believe I imagined it….
Posted by Steve - Fri 08 Sep 2006 13:04
wombat
…only thing that I'd like to have seen tested is whether the cpu has enough oomph to be able to record tv, preferably with something like a cheap little USB digital tv stick.
Recording digital tv doesn't take much CPU. All that's required is taking the particular channel out of the MPEG-TS multiplex of ~6 channels and saving it to disk in a container of some sort. It's already MPEG-II, so no encoding required, as such.

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