Interior Appearance
Inside, you get a much better view of what's changed.
The EPIA-SP mainboard itself is the most obvious difference to latch onto. Here's a closer look.
The cooler for CPU and CN400 looms large in the top left, VT8237 sits not far away. The ASIC cluster that add the rest of the peripheral features are tucked into the bottom and right hand sides of the board, as you look at the photograph above. Tranquil have also taken the time to beef up the PCI card retainer, to stop cards from slipping out during transit. A pair of screw posts retain the assembly to the chassis more securely than on previous revisions.
I mentioned the fin heatsink on the previous page, that connects to the CPU and CN400's cooler using heatpipes. It's a one and a quarter kilo heatsink assembly (which is the same weight as Intel's Type 1 BTX Thermal Module!) making it more than plenty, even passively cooled, for the tiny EPIA processor and northbridge ASIC.
The disk caddy is a three-sided aluminium heatsink, just over half a kilo in weight. The sink assembly is tied to an anti-vibration frame that stops the disks installed from making resonated noise when they seek or are accessed. That brings me on nicely to the disk subsystem that Tranquil will tie into production versions of an EPIA-SP-based T2.e. While the preview unit was shipped with the same ATA Samsung Spinpoint as the prior EPIA MII version, Tranquil confirmed that production versions will use a SATA Spinpoint when they're released in March.
Returning to the topmost photograph, you can see the area in between the PCI card section and the disk caddy is increased due to the longer chassis depth. That gives you more room around PCI cards for cooling and potential to mount longer cards in the future.
The preview unit, as seen in the external photographs, comes equipped with dual TV tuners. Tranquil are sticking with Black Gold's DVB-T tuners for the EPIA-SP T2.e units.
