VIA EPIA M10000 Mini-Itx Review

VIA EPIA M10000 Official Product Page

Review by Erik Pettersen ( reviews AT BYOPVR.com )

This mighty small all-in-one motherboard is certainly feature rich, but is it powerful enough to be an HTPC/PVR? Read on…

The box it came in was small, and it was good

The first thing about the VIA EPIA M10000 that struck me was just how small the mini-itx form factor really is. Its one thing to see 17 cm x 17 cm listed as the size, and another to actually see it. Being stuck on the standard measurement system all my life I didn’t comprehend how small 17 centimeters is. No wonder the case mod community loves sticking these boards into Millennium Falcon models, toasters, and whatnot.

The obligatory what came in the box shots

Initially I mated the VIA EPIA M10000 with a Casetronic C137 mini-itx case, 256MB Crucial DDR-SDRAM, Maxtor drive, and a Hauppauge WinTV PVR-350.

Installation was a breeze. The manual explained everything in clear detail. Assuming you’ve built a PC before there is nothing new or exciting here for you. It’s just smaller. One quibble: I’m convinced that the printed manual has the settings for the s/pdif_sel jumper backwards on page 2-19. This is the jumper that changes the functionality of the RCA jack on the motherboard to either be a composite video output OR a digital surround sound s/pdif output.

Installing the M10000 in to the C137

I had no issue at all installing WindowsXP Pro, or the myriad of windows updates required on a clean M$ install. Here’s my other minor quibble: I like to check for updated device drivers on a manufacturer’s website because the drivers on any given installation/driver CD is obsolete by the time it’s pressed and shipped with the product. I had some difficulty discerning whether the drivers at VIA's EPIA M10000 driver page were newer or older than what I had on disk. Some of the drivers had revision dates, others didn’t. The version numbering isn’t present or labeled within the directory structure of the included CD. I also checked out the driver section at VIA ARENA but that only confused me more because they use different terminology and revision/dates and I wasn’t sure what was what. Not a huge deal, I just usually don’t like to work so hard to find out if I have the latest drivers installed.

WinXP Install: better go brew a pot of coffee

I was pretty impressed with how snappy the M10000 felt when doing web surfing and other general computing tasks. I did run some synthetic benchmarks using SiSoft’s Sandra benchmarking tool, which just serves to underline the fact that this small form factor board isn’t a hot rod muscle machine.

WCPUID stats, Sandra Multimedia and CPU Arithmetic benchmarks

Not to belabor the point but the EPIA M10000 is not meant to be an uber-gaming rig. It’s designed to be a tiny, cool, and quiet multimedia machine. Generally you’d still need a fair amount of CPU horsepower to handle multimedia functions. The 1Ghz CPU coupled with the built in MPEG hardware accelerator (more on the “accelerator” in a minute) is snappy enough to handle most of your media playback needs without missing a beat. It’ll play mp3’s without breaking a sweat. MPEG2 files as well as DVDs playback just fine without over taxing the CPU or dropping frames. Small and medium resolution DivX files truck on pretty well (60 – 100% CPU utilization). If you have large resolution DivX or MPEG4 files you might be asking too much of the little CPU and get dropped frames, and audio sync issues.

The M10000 playing back MPEG2 via software only decoding
(note: the screenshot didn't capture the MPEG2, but trust me it's playing)

Because of the M10000’s limited horsepower, the only way to get reliable TV encoding/recording is to use a hardware-based encoder like Hauppauge’s WinTV PVR 250/350. I used a PVR350 for this project because it is what I had handy. You can of course use other tuner/capture cards as long as they have built in hardware encoding.

Utilizing a hardware-based encoding tuner card the M10000 did not break a sweat recording television programming at all. That’s mostly a function of the quality of the tuner card, but it’s important to point out that you can indeed record high quality hardware-based encoded MPEG2 on the somewhat pedestrian CPU on the M10000. In fact I had no problem recording one show while watching a previously recorded program even with the slight added overhead of running SageTV 2.0 PVR software/front end. That is a critical performance threshold to be considered if you are trying to use the M10000 as a TiVo-esque device. Which is the whole point of this review =).

A lot of people in the BYOPVR community (myself including up to recently) have been mistakenly referring to the embedded MPEG-2 Accelerator generically as a “hardware decoder”. It is not a full on MPEG decoder. It would be more accurate to think of it as hardware assist decoding chip. It’s a subtle but important distinction. It does help with MPEG2/DVD playback performance, BUT you really have to have specific drivers installed and software that supports the hardware assisted playback.

The documentation is scarce/nonexistent on how to take full advantage of the M10000’s hardware accelerating MPEG2 decoding capabilities. I’m still not sure if I was utilizing the built in MPEG2 hardware acceleration or not. I believe I enabled it through some registry tweaks found in some obscure forum post hiding under a rock somewhere, but it only provided a modest improvement in playback CPU performance (10% - 25% less CPU utilization on average). Since the MPEG acceleration is one of the cooler/desirable features of the M10000, I was a little under whelmed. It’s useful and an important feature, I just expected more of a performance boost and less hassle enabling it.

DVD playback using powerDVD (bundled DVD player software with my OEM DVD burner - I don't recommmend it) with hardware acceleration enabled was between 20% – 40% CPU utilization (without hardware acceleration 35% – 65% utilization). The TV out drivers left me a little under whelmed as well. I couldn’t overcome some of the black boxing/overscanning when using the S-video out with the included VIA utilities. I had to choose between having a black bar at the top of the screen, or the screen that was blown up way too big, with no granularity of control for positioning or size of the TV output.


CONCLUSION/SUMMARY:

The M10000 is small, reasonably robust for the speed/processor it is (it’s not going to win you any SETI@HOME honors though), is full of cool built in features, is quiet, and cool (in both senses of the word). When coupled with a hardware-based encoder it handles the load of multimedia machine HTPC/PVR admirably. I really like the M10000 and think it has a unique place in the DIY PVR world, and if it weren’t for some slightly annoying driver/software glitches I would have rated it much higher. Suffice to say I await VIA’s upcoming mini-itx (and nano-itx) offerings with great anticipation (especially the recently announced EPIA SP series with built in MPEG4 acceleration).

Final Score: 7 out of 10

Pros:
· really small form factor
· quiet
· cool running
· faster than expected for general computing
· lots of integrated goodies

Take it or Leave it:
· hardware MPEG acceleration helps DVD playback but was disappointing (compared to a full/true mpeg decoding solution)

Cons:
· some driver confusion
· a little pricey for performance
· TV out (or TV out driver/software) lacked granular adjustment for overscanning

Final Recommendation: The M10000 and it’s slower clock speed cousins make for great quiet/thin media client PC’s by themselves, or work great when paired with the crisp S-Video out of a PVR350 and SageTV2.0 - Review (or MythTV for the linux faithful). Using the VIA M10000 with a PVR350 helps overcome the few limitations noted in the review.

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Special thanks to VIA and VIA Embedded for providing the M10000 review unit for our evaluation.