couple this with a touch screen LCD for a sweet little car computer. low heat and electricity are perfect for cars, especially down here in louisiana. I dont think i'd want a pentium M to boot up after having my car in the sun for a few hours.

At this price point, the performance is laughable. Perhaps at half that price would the size/heat/noise savings be worth it.

Still, what would a decently clocked mITX Pentium M setup cost?

Peh, who cares.

I wonder if my EPIA800 still costs the same now as it did 3 years ago when I bought it?

Yes. There's been near to NO price reductions on this stuff. It isn't as if I can buy today's best VIA BUDGET CPU on a motherboard for £70 is it? No. The prices have only gone up, and typical price pressures haven't been there to make the area competitive.

But...............

What happened to the "end of Q2" C7?

(the 'thing' I said would not 'happen', and didn't)

OMG VIA SO SLOW 11!1!!ELEVENTY11!1!

VIA's mini-itx gear is nowhere near the front of the performance pack - we're all aware of that. The form factor and especially the power usage is extremely impressive, however.

I, for one, am a big fan of not using more than you need for a particular application. In general, if you're a 'power user' (or simply like to have a ridiculously fast machine to make people think what you do actually requires it) you already have a machine tailored to that purpose - a mini-itx system would be for another application entirely.

Could an old celeron system do what my EPIA system does? sure - but not the way the EPIA does it. it sits in a small corner of my bookshelf, it's silent, and it's pulling less than 25 watts.

this new EPIA system offers similar benefits and is able to take on some more demanding tasks - in terms of the average home user running secondary PC tasks, there's little this thing won't be able to handle.

I find this information interesting, even if the previous forum posts indicate a less than welcoming reception. For those of us with applications that are constrained by size and heat production, VIA has had the only economical alternative to the Pentium M. And although it might be interesting to get some kind of 64-bit processor into the Mini-ITX form factor, it's likely the board manufacturers believe that their intended market may not need the performance. This dual-cpu version may be a way of cheaply (for VIA) gauging the demand for this in the embedded and SFF market.

If anyone is interested, idotpc has been claiming that it can "Ship in 24-48 hours", but also that "Presale, shipment begins mid September", since the end of August. It's too pricey for me, right now. I'm probably most irritated that this thing was announced in March, and if VIA had their act together they could have been in mass production and at a reasonable price point already.

This thing is useless just like VIA's other cpu's. <Yawn> How fast is it? A celeron 800 or somewhere around there. Stick to chipsets...you can't even do that correctly....

It's not worth buying Via mITX boards with the lack of support they have.

I have an Epia M10000, the latest official BIOS for this is 1.16 only there are 2 problems with this:
1) DMA lockups - Via have released a beta BIOS that fixes this
2) PXE boot fails after NIC is placed in S3 state - Via have released an updated PXE ROM but not rolled it in to a BIOS.

Via need to release a 1.17 BIOS which is the DMA beta BIOS plus the new PXE ROM, I managed to roll my own in under an hour, why can't they? Requests have been posted at Viaarena.com forums and ignored.

The first company that makes a mini ITX socket 939MB for sweet AMD64x2 dual core action will stomp on this, especially with Cool N Quiet turned on.

Imagine power saving and actual serious computing power in one package.

A real small package.

Edit: Supposed to be a reply to #5...

A Pentium-M doesn't have the thermal needs of a 939 CPU.

That said, the Commell LV-674 (which isn't yet out) will have an i945G and an LGA775 socket. What goes into an LGA775 socket, especially when the chipset's an i945G? Yep, a Pentium D. 'Nuff said.

I think a 939 board is definitely doable.

However, I also don't think anybody's going to do it. For some reason, all of the embedded Mini-ITX manufacturers think that AMD is only good for Geodes. And, most of the consumer Mini-ITX manufacturers (VIA, Lex, and FIC) don't make anything other than C3/Eden or Pentium III mobos.

Now, there's a couple of consumer MITX manufacturers that make P4 mobos...

I think our best bet is to convince ECS (I don't care for them, but I've heard their quality HAS gone up) to make the board. They've got experience with Mini-ITX, or at least a formfactor close to it, with the EVEm+ (an Eden/VIA board), ES4m (a P4/SiS board), and ES7m (a soldered-on Duron/SiS board). An EA8m or EN8m (RS480 or C51G) could be QUITE nice.

Errr, so exactly will (2) 1GHz Via processors equal to in performance?

A Celeron 500?

Maybe if we're lucky a single Pentium III 1GHz?

Considering the relative worthlessness of Via CPU's thus far, I think they're just trying to jump on the "dual" buzzword bandwagon and make a quick buck on another stillborn product.

Show me benchmarks against contemporary low-end single and dual-core CPU's. I like to see VIA defend its hard-earned spot on the bottom of every graph.