VIA EPIA’s have always been a favorite among case modders and small form factor aficionados. Its small size, nearly silent operation, and integrated features made it perfect for small projects. The projects have varied from a liquor bottle PC to RC car PC’s. The small size opens up limitless possibilities for custom do-it-yourself case projects. While the size was perfectly fine, EPIA’s have been under powered and could use some extra oomph.

It’s been a while since VIA initially announced their C7 processor but it’s now starting to show up in products. The new C7 processor promises low power consumption with more processing power over the existing C3 series of processors. After initially being shown at CES 2006, C7 powered products are beginning to show up in retail channels. The first C7 product we’ll be looking at is VIA’s new EPIA EN15000. With a new processor and chipset, does VIA’s new EPIA EN15000 have what it takes to serve multimedia or daily duties, or will it still be underpowered like previous EPIA’s. Keep reading to find out.

 

Motherboard	EPIA EN15000
Processor	VIA C7 1.5 GHz
Chipset	VIA CN700 + VT8237R
Memory	1 x 240 pin DDR SDRAM at 400/533 MHz up to 1GB supported
Audio	VIA VT1618 6 channel AC’97
LAN	1 x VIA VT1622 Gigabit Controller
Parallel ATA	2
Serial ATA	2 x SATA 150 with support for RAID 0, 1, JBOD
Firewire	VIA VT6307S
On-Board Video	VIA UniChrome Pro AGP
Expansion	1 x PCI
Rear panel I/O	2 x PS/2 keyboard/mouse 1 x RCA output for Composite or S/PDIF (Jumper) 1 x SVIDEO 1 x VGA 1 x Serial port (COM) 1 x RJ45 (LAN) 4 x USB 2.0 1 x line-in/line-out/mic (audio, assignable for 5.1)
Internal I/O	4 X Serial ATA 150 connectors 2 x UDMA ATA 133/100/66 Bus Master IDE connectors 2 x SATA 150 1 x USB 2.0/1.1 connectors (supports 8 ports) 1 x IEEE 1394a connectors (supports 1 ports) 2 x cooling fan pin headers 1 x CD in connector 1 x Front Panel audio connector 1 x Serial port (COM) header 1 x JLPC header 1 x S/PDIF in/out connector 1 x LVDS/TTL/DVI module connector (add-on card is required) 1 x Component (YPbPr video pin header)
Power	ATX 20-pin

 

VIA’s EPIA EN15000 is pretty standard. It uses VIA’s new C7 processor clocked at 1.5 GHz, though a passively cooled 1.2 GHz model is also available. The new C7 is fabricated on IBM’s 90nm SOI technology and uses VIA’s new V4 bus clocked at 400 MHz. Though it has a fancy new name, VIA’s V4 bus is essentially the same as the bus used on P4 processors. Additionally the processor has your usual SSE2, SSE3 multimedia instructions, a full speed Floating Point Unit, NX bit support, and enhanced hardware encryption acceleration algorithms.

With a new processor comes a new chipset as well. The EPIA EN15000 couples a new CN700 northbridge with a dated VT8237R southbridge. There are very little feature differences between the previous CN400 used on later C3 based EPIA’s and the new CN700. Aside for support for VIA’s V4 bus and DDR2 400/533 support, the CN700 shares the same UniChrome Pro AGP graphics core as the CN400. This is pretty disappointing as the UniChrome Pro graphics core could use a few upgrades in the multimedia department—mainly h.264 and WMV-HD hardware accelerated decoding.

Integration of the VT8237R south bridge is disappointing as well, especially since VIA has a shiny new VT8251 that supports PCI Express, high definition audio, and SATAII. Instead VIA leaves us with the dated VT8237R which only supports PCI, AC’97 audio, and SATA 150.

The rest of the specifications are nothing too special. Audio is provided by VIA’s VT1618 AC’97 audio codec, whether or not this is a good thing has yet to be determined as this is our first encounter with the codec. Gigabit is powered by VIA’s VT1622 PHY while expansion is limited to a single PCI slot—just like every other EPIA.

The Board

Our EPIA EN15000 sample is a production sample pulled from the warehouse. We originally received a fanless EPIA EN12000 model but ran into problems so VIA sent us an EPIA EN15000 replacement. As with past multimedia-centric EPIA boards, the EN15000 uses the same blue PCB found on various EPIA M, MII, and SP’s. A large heat sink covering the CPU, north, and southbridge keeps everything within operating temperature. Due to its higher clock speed, the EPIA EN15000 requires a 40mm fan to keep things cool whereas the EN12000 is completely passively cooled.

EPIA’s have never really used a standardized rear I/O layout and the EN15000 is no different. From left to right there’s your usual PS2 keyboard/mouse, Serial, VGA, Ethernet, USB 2.0, RCA, SVIDEO, and audio ports. The yellow RCA port serves double duty as a composite video out or coaxial S/PDIF output while the three analog audio jacks are assignable for 6 channel output.

Additional support for digital LCD displays or a DVI output can be added via a separate add-on module. There’s also support for a component video output (YPbPr) via onboard header, though a quick Google search doesn’t bring up any brackets for it. Nonetheless the onboard component video output is capable of supporting 1080i and 720p resolutions.

 

The rest of the board is pretty tightly packed. Due to the tightly packed nature of the EN15000, there’s only room to accommodate one stick of memory. This limits you to a maximum of 1GB of ram, though for its intended market and purpose 1GB should be perfectly fine. Additionally there are also two PATA connectors and two SATA connectors. The SATA ports only support SATA 150 drives and has problems with occasionally not detecting Seagate SATAII drives, though our HGST SATAII drive worked flawlessly.

 

 

 The new C7 is a tiny processor—smaller than the VIA VT8237R south bridge.

 

 

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• The Board (1 of 11)
• Test Setup (2 of 11)
• SiSoft Sandra 2005 (3 of 11)
• ScienceMark 2 (4 of 11)
• Cinebench 2003 (5 of 11)
• Audio performance (6 of 11)
• USB Performance (7 of 11)
• HDTV & DIVX Playback (8 of 11)
• WMV-HD Playback (9 of 11)
• h.264 HD Playback (10 of 11)
• Power Consumption & Conclusion (11 of 11)