Refine search for Motherboards

  Discuss this article      Email this to a friend TrustedReviews Newsletters

The VIA mini-ITX form factor has taken the world by storm and that’s no mean feat. The latest iteration is the EPIA CL, which is not a direct consumer product as such, but rather something geared towards a more specialized market. The reason for this is that the EPIA CL board features dual 10/100Mbit LAN as well as support for up to four serial ports. There is however no reason why the EPIA CL couldn’t make its home in say a purpose built firewall, an Internet connection sharing machine or a print server, or indeed even a combination of all three. Other uses that spring to mind are a small file server, fax server or a NAS box, although I’m sure there are many more.

To make this review more interesting I decided to try to turn the EPIA CL in to a Firewall box. But I’ll get back to that a little later and delve in to the motherboard itself first.

As with all the other EPIA motherboards, you get a hard-wired CPU as part of the package. This might sound a bit unusual with zero upgrade potential, but as the EPIA family of products are targeted at specific market segments, upgradeability is not a major concern.

The board measures a mere 170 x 170mm which makes this one of the smallest platforms based on an x86 processor. The CPU is a VIA C3 unit based on the Nehemiah core running at 1GHz. This might not sound a lot with modern CPU’s hitting over 3GHz, but it is sufficient for the intended use. The C3 processor features 128KB of Level 1 and 64KB of Level 2 cache. This is a fairly small amount of cache memory compared to modern high-end CPUs but it seems to do the job. The real advantage here is the cooling system. The C3 processor only needs a tiny fan which means that the noise level is kept to a bare minimum.

As you would expect the EPIA CL incorporates a VIA chipset, the CLE266 which has a few unique features. As the CLE266 is aimed at integrated platforms you’ll find on-board graphics as standard. This means that you’ll lose some system memory to the graphics subsystem, but you can set the amount that’s allocated in the BIOS; between 16 and 64MB can be utilized.

Surprisingly, the CLE266 chipset supports hardware MPEG-2 decoding, so the load on the CPU will be reduced when watching DVD movies. This is one of the main reasons that the EPIA M platform has been so successful, as it offers a great platform for a home entertainment PC at low cost. The chipset is passively cooled which again helps to reduce the noise level of this board compared to high-end PCs that can sometimes be very noisy.

The I/O panel consists of the standard PS/2 ports for mouse and keyboard, a D-SUB connector for the integrated graphics, a parallel port, a serial port, four USB 2.0 ports, two 10/100Mbit RJ45 Ethernet ports and three audio connectors for Line out, Line in and Mic. On the motherboard you’ll find two IDE connectors, a floppy drive connector, a single memory slot for PC2100 DDR SDRAM, a standard ATX power connector, a single PCI slot, three headers for optional serial ports and a connector for two optional USB 2.0 ports.

The PCI slot leaves some room for expansion, but choose your case carefully if you intend to use it, as there is not always space for a PCI card in many of the small cases.
Companies such as www.ultim8pc.co.uk or www.mini-itx.com offer a range of suitable cases if you have a tough time finding one elsewhere.

The features of the EPIA CL board predetermine its uses. It’s not a great board for a home PC, nor a multimedia machine. It is however a great solution for any of the earlier mentioned solutions. It does run Windows XP, but without ample amounts of memory it is a bit of a slouch when doing so, but again, this is not what I would use an EPIA CL board for.