While VIA prepares some new motherboards like EPIA-M910 and EPIA-920 (last one will be equipped with quad core CPU and VX11 (VT3456) chipset which has integrated DX11 compatible GPU) I've made a decision on my own configuration. It is quite unusual and consists of VIA embedded parts mainly. So I've decided to take EPIA-M900 (EPIA-M900-16L) motherboard and eH1 graphics card. I've already received this hardware and started to test it.
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| In Win BM-639, VIA eH1, VIA EPIA-M900 boxes |
EPIA-M900 is the most quality made motherboard from VIA embedded I've ever seen (especially compared to the most of VB series and old models). However, I admit that some recent models are similar by quality too. On the other hand this quality comes at substantially higher price than I would like to see. Unfortunately cooling system is made in VIA "fashion". It consists of the big aluminum heatsink over CPU and chipset and small, annoyingly loud fan. On the bright side the fan speed is controlled by CPU load using smart fan function in BIOS. However, it still emits unpleasant sound even at lower speed. GPU has a fan too but it seems less audible (no speed control). EPIA-M900 box is visually not appealing as it looks like simple corrugated cardboard box (I've never saw the one like that for motherboards earlier but as it is targeted for embedded market VIA probably decided to save money on box visual appearance). You will find a SATA cable, driver's CD and I/O shield besides the board itself. Yet again it is quite ordinary minimal set of accessories you'll find in most VIA products. There was two main reasons I chose this board. Firstly, it was the only VIA Nano X2 board which had a PCI-E x16 (effective speed up to x8) slot, secondly EPIA-M900 had two RAM slots and supported 8GB RAM while VB8004 (the other candidate) only one. Besides, it was easier to get than VB8004 with its graphics module.
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| EPIA-M900 |
VIA eH1 has more visual appealing and more standard box for such products. Accessories include DVI-VGA adapter and driver's CD. There is one caveat that you'll find a Linux tux image on the box indicating this graphics card "support" Linux but you won't find any drivers neither on cd nor in VIA Embedded web page. You can download some Linux drivers on s3graphics web site but you still won't be able to use them on modern Linux distributions as it has some code that won't compile on current kernel. I guess the card itself is supported by those proprietary drivers but I couldn't test them due to reason I mentioned above. There are no open source drivers for this GPU so the only way to use this card is VESA driver or try an older distributions (with 2.6.38 kernel or maybe even less). What is more, it doesn't use solid state capacitors as S3 graphics similar products.
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| VIA eH1 graphics card |
The motherboard itself had some surprises that I hadn't notice or they hadn't been clearly defined in specifications. Firstly, most pin headers was smaller in size than standard ones. USB headers are surprisingly standard ones but front panel audio, fan, kbms and COM headers are mini variants. I saw smaller fan header (but forgot to check that they were only ones) and I knew about smaller COM headers but they were unneeded for me. Unfortunately I didn't know that front panel audio header and kbms header would be mini ones too. I actually don't know where to get adapters for them right now too. Second surprise was a missing RAID support in BIOS firmware (or I didn't found it). I though that such RAID support existed in all boards currently and you even had no need to check that.
I tried some open source operating systems during this weekend. Linux (Fedora 16, openSUSE 12.1) and FreeBSD installed ok. NetBSD didn't boot (I guess because it doesn't support VX900 chipset still) but dual core CPU was recognized (UPDATE 2012-05-02: VX900 IDE support was added recently, so NetBSD 6_BETA currently boots on this board). Haiku boot sequence ended in kdebug with some stack trace. PC-BSD didn't boot too but it seems that it was a DVD boot loader problem because FreeBSD installed without any problems and surprisingly recognized all motherboard's integrated hardware (as you may or may not know PC-BSD is just desktop orientated FreeBSD variant). As I mentioned earlier eH1 graphics card and its HD audio is not supported on any open source OSes (except VESA driver).
I'll try to make some tests in open source OSes and/or Windows later on but I don't make any promises this time. I hope to test power usage too. To end this article on good note the board itself feels really good. It uses the most modern chips from VIA like VT2021 HD audio, VT6130 Gigabit Ethernet controller, VX900 integrated graphics with H.264 decoding acceleration on Windows, 8GB support (unfortunately USB 3.0 was not added for some unknown reason as the place for two connectors and VIA Labs chip was designed on the board). Smart fan control makes default fan bearable on idle. Finally dual core CPU has modern instructions support up to SSE4.1 and Intel compatible virtualization and it feels quite fast (I compiled quite a lot of source during this weekend, y-cruncher result is comparable to Merom 3M dual core pentium or celeron CPUs). Finally, the board quality gives hopes that VIA will continue to make more boards like this in the future and even improve them. BIOS could me more capable but it is embedded board so requirements are minimal for them I guess. Quite good FreeBSD support was a pleasant surprise too. I can't tell much about eH1 GPU right now as it will show its capabilities on Windows only.
P.S. I've updated my last article on VIA Nano X2 solutions several times too. Probably I'll keep to do this for some time in the future.
