Where do I live again? Oh yah, California, the state where electricity is rather expensive, especially if you tend to use a lot of it. You see, I have a machine room in my house. No, really, an entire dedicated room! And a bunch of DELL 2550's, all on 24x7 and pretty much running my poor 1400 VA UPS at 100% load.
When my electricity bill started to surpass my T1 bill I decided I had to do something. The machines were quite simply far too powerful for the processes running on them, so I began looking for some low power alternatives. A couple of people chipped into the conversation on freebsd-hackers and in fairly short order I was homing in on the VIA EPIA offerings.
But before I get into my review of the boxes I wound up purchasing I am going to give you my recommendations on where to get these babies. I found two sites: www.idotpc.com and mini-itx.com. I strongly recommend IDot for U.S. purchases. My orders shipped within a day and I received in them in short order. The one RMA I had to do (described in the EPIA 5000 review) was handled quickly and professionally. The Mini-Itx site (not associated with the mini-itx footprint/brand) is a good place for purchases in Britain and they are great people, but they are not really a commercial venture and they use PayPal. And we all know how royally screwed up PayPal is when it comes to currency conversions.
The EPIA-5000 is roughly equivalent to a 350 MHz Celeron. The fully integrated motherboard has two fast IDE channels, 100BaseT ethernet, AGP video, keyboard, mouse, one serial port, one parallel port, sound, and T.V. and S-Video output (for certain video modes). There is one PCI slot but it is virtually unusable in the small cases. You can see the FreeBSD-4.x dmesg output.
FreeBSD recognizes the whole lot, and though I haven't tested it I believe Linux recognizes the whole lot as well, so this winds up being a great platform for a home server. The EPIA-5000 doesn't have the video bandwidth to produce good video so I would not recommend it as a workstation, and if you use a tiny case like I am there won't be enough room for a video card to mitigate the issue. The higher-end EPIA M-9000 is lightyears better at video.
The 5000 has two DIMM slots and takes PC100 or PC133 ram. It will not take the super-old PC100 ram (that didn't have the serial id sense). I haven't had any problem throwing in two PC100 sticks but despite what the literature says you can only throw in a single PC133 stick. The system gets corrupted and unstable with two PC133 sticks even if you drop the FSB down to 100MHz. When I originally bought my system from IDot I had purchased two 256MB PC133 sticks. I later had to RMA the two sticks and get a single 512MB PC133 stick as a replacement from IDot. The RMA went smoothly. I have since done further tests and my conclusion is that it is not the fault of the ram. The motherboard has a drive problem with two PC133 sticks.
Lets not lose sight of my goal, here, which is to greatly reduce power consumption. the EPIA-5000 motherboard costs $100 from IDot, without ram, HD, or case. I got the superslim ITX case with a 60W AC power supply ($84) to house it. The result is 5-15W of power (verses the 150-300W that a normal desktop PC uses).
In regards to cost, it all depends on what you happen to already have. If you get the whole system new in a minimal configuration, the cheapest combo you can get from IDot is:
Minimal Configuration Matt's Configuration
EPIA-5000 MB $100 EPIA-5000 MB $100
128MB PC133 $ 23 512M PC133 $ 89
30G IDE drive $ 76 100G drive (CompUSA) $100
ITX-PG Super $ 65 SuperSlim ITX/60W $ 84
Mini-ITX tower
-------- ------
$264 $373
Don't forget: if you want to stick Windows onto this thing you have to purchase it separately and that can cost as much as the rest of the system. With a little work you can almost certainly find lower-cost components. Look in your local Fryes, CompUSA, or BestBuy for better deals on RAM and hard drives. Cases might be more difficult... remember, this is a MINI-ITX form factor, not ATX, not full-sized. It was worth it to me to get my case through IDot just so I wouldn't have to worry about the motherboard fitting.
The EPIA M-9000 is roughly equivalent to a 500 MHz Celeron. The fully integrated motherboard has all the stuff you see on the EPIA 5000 *plus* two firewire ports and two additional usb ports (for four total). The USB ports support USB 2.0. You can see the FreeBSD-4.x dmesg output.
The EPIA EM-6000 is a slower version of the 9000 which does not require a cpu fan. The M-9000 runs at 933MHz while the 6000 runs at 600MHz.
FreeBSD recognizes the whole lot, including the firewire, and though I haven't tested it I believe Linux recognizes the whole lot as well, so this winds up being a great platform for a home server. The 6000/9000 have far, far better video then the 5000 and is plenty good enough for workstation purposes. There are, however, a couple of gotchas. The first gotcha is FreeBSD's firewire support: It isn't far enough advanced to handle device detachments smoothly so don't expect it to work as well as USB. Gotcha #2: FreeBSD will run the USB 2.0 ports as USB 1.0, so you don't get the extra speed (yet). Gotcha #3: VIA includes an X11 video driver for Linux, but they blew the system-independance part and it takes some hacking to get it to work with X11 on FreeBSD. I have another section on how to get the EPIA M-9000's video to work under FreeBSD HERE. UPDATE: It looks like XFree86-4.3.99.3 or later has a driver for the CLE266 chipset, which the EM-6000 and M-9000 use. However, as of the time I tested it the driver is only in the development version of XFree86 and requires some patching to work.
The 6000/9000 has a single memory slot. It takes one PC2100 (DDR266) memory stick. I guess VIA gave up on trying to drive two slots :-).
Power utilization is in the 20-35W range, still far better then a typical desktop.
The EPIA M-9000 motherboard costs $158 from IDot (the 5000 costs $100), so we are talking another $58 for a phenominal improvement in capability. The EM-6000 costs slightly less then the M-9000. I got an IRX-PC Aluminum Silent Cube 200W (Black) case ($109) from IDot to house the 9000 that I tested. The case is quite fine but the firewire insert takes up the backpanel for the single PCI slot, so if you use the slot you have to take out the firewire insert. Also, the slot isn't full length, so you might not be able to stuff your favorite video card into it. A Super Mini-ITX Tower case costs less but isn't as cool looking, I'm afraid I don't know where the firewire insert goes in it though so I don't know if it is any better then the Cube.
I got two of the 9000's and installed Windows 2000 on one for my brother. Windows 2000 installed seemlessly, including all the VIA-supplied drivers, and it ran photoshop a lot better then my brother's old Pentium III 450 box.
I bundled the EPIA EM-6000's I got from idotpc.com with the ITX-PV case, which is really the casetronic Mini ITX-2699 case. The case is very nice with a front-loaded port for USB and firewire (that the aluminum cube was missing). These cases use external DC bricks rather then internal power supplies. The ITX-PV as shipped has two small case fans. Even though the EM-6000 is fanless you still need some airflow and you cannot simply unplug the fans, but you can slow them down a little by putting two 47ohm 1W resistors inline with each one (if you know how to solder. If you do this make sure you seal all exposed copper with electrical tape!), making the result almost completely silent.
I also had two other issues with these cases. First, the power cable bundle on the right hand side of the motherboard touches the cpu heat sink, and the heat sink just gets too hot for my tastes, so I use a little tie to force it away from the heat sink. Second, airflow is absolutely required across the chipset and cpu heat sinks. The heat sinks are on the right hand side of the motherboard, and the case fans are on the rear-left, so I taped over the vents on the left side of the case so the fans would force air across the heat sink through to the air vents on the right side of the case.
First, memory. In nearly all situations memory tends to be by far the most important resource a computer can have. If I had the choice between, say, a P3-600 with 512M of ram and a P4-2GHz with 128M of ram, I would choose the P3-450 hands down. Memory is the key to being able to get the most out of any computer system and it is even more key on systems with underpowered cpus, so if you are getting an EPIA box as a server or workstation, DON'T SKIMP ON MEMORY!.
Second, memory bandwidth. Intel cpus tend to have far more raw memory bandwidth then VIA cpus. It's just a fact of life. Both the EPIA 5000 and the EPIA M-9000 have only around 70 MBytes/sec of memory bandwidth, whereas a pentium 3 typically has 500MBytes/sec or more, and a pentium 4 clocks in at 1-3 GBytes/sec. For this reason the EPIA boards are not going to be good at things which blow the cpu cache, which means that the EPIA boards are going to score much lower on benchmarks then Intel or AMD chips. But this doesn't mean that their performance in real-world jobs is going to be worse!. Most real-world computing tasks on both workstations and servers make good use of the cpu's L1 and L2 cache, so don't be fooled by benchmarks, the EPIA boards perform a lot better then they might imply.
What does low memory bandwidth really effect? It effects services which have to process large amounts of sequential data. A POP Mail server handling lots of huge multi-megabyte mailboxes tends to want to scan the mailbox files during connection startup and might not be the best use of an EPIA board. A Samba server, on the otherhand, would work fairly well since ethernet is limited to 10 MBytes/sec, as would a Web server and Name server. You will also run into trouble on lower-end EPIA boards such as the EPIA 5000 is when you have to deal with lots of tiny chunks of random information, like lots of tiny packets or lots of tiny files. For example, I run one of the U.S. ORDB name servers on an EPIA-5000. It handles around 230 random requests/sec and eats around 33% of the cpu to accomplish the feat. This means that the EPIA-5000 has an upper limit of around 700 DNS requests per second. A P3-1Ghz could probably do 1500-2000.
Third: Power. The EPIA 5000 eats 9-15W. The 9000 eats 17-25W. A typical low-end desktop eats 60-150W. A typical high-end desktop (especially anything running a pentium 3 or pentium 4) might eat 150-300W. If you leave your machines on 24x7 like I do, power can cost real money. PG&E charges me $0.11 KWh (up to $0.22 KWh in the summer), so each 50W of power (24x7) costs 36KWh/month or around $4 in the winter, and $8 in the summer. When my machine room was full of high-end machines it was costing me 1200W 24x7 or 864KWh/month = $100/mo in the winter and $200/mo in the summer. By consolidating my server functions into less power-hungry EPIA boxes I am only paying 1/3 of that number in machine-room electricity now. That isn't chump change.
Forth: Space savings. Motherboard integration has reached the point where virtually the only thing you might want to add is a high-end video card. Even then it is not strictly necessary for most purposes. An EPIA M-9000 based machine is suitable for everyone except the most extreme PC Gamer. You should consider the EPIA series if the integration allows you to avoid any additional add-ons. If you need lots of add-on boards (beyond what the EPIA builds into the motherboard), then the EPIA series isn't for you.