A viable pint-sized home theater platform?
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The question of "how fast is fast enough" has plagued me since VIA's tiny EPIA-M10000 platform arrived at my doorstep in what seemed like far too small of a box to hold a motherboard and CPU. Just 17cm square, the EPIA-M10000 is a midget (sorry, little person) among small form factor platforms. The fact that the board features a new revision of VIA's notoriously slow C3 processor almost makes it hard to take the EPIA-M10000 seriously, but I'm trying to be open-minded.
With a new "Nehemiah" core C3 processor running at a cool 1GHz, a full speed FPU, support for DDR SDRAM, and a hardware MPEG-2 decoder, the EPIA-M10000 at least has the potential to be fast enough for mainstream desktops and even home theater PCs. Read on as I explore the features and performance of VIA's newest Mini-ITX platform to find out just how much power this pint-size platform is packing.
