VIA EPIA-SN Mini-ITX Motherboard

Vote: Thumbs Down or Thumbs Up Our Rating: 91%       Manufacturer: VIA Technologies

Test System

Memory: 2x 1GB DDR2-1186 Geil (Supplied by Geil)

Hard Disk: 500GB Seagate 7200.9 (Supplied by Seagate Australia)

Graphics Card: MSI GeForce 8800GTS 640MB (Supplied by MSI)

Cooling: GIGABYTE Neon775 (Supplied by GIGABYTE)

Operating System: Microsoft Windows XP SP2

Drivers: VIA Hyperion, Forceware 163.21

Today’s test systems are based around two VIA EPIA platforms; the EPIA-SN which is our new one and the older EPIA-EX. The EPIA-EX runs with a 1.5GHz C7 CPU and the EPIA-SN uses a 1.8GHz CPU with new generation graphics system.

The EPIA-EX uses a single 2GB generic DIMM and its onboard graphics were set to a 256MB frame buffer. The EPIA-SN used 2x 1GB DIMM modules to run dual channel and the onboard graphics were set to 256MB. When running discrete we only used our 8800GTX graphics card on the EPIA-SN, as it was the only board that supported the discrete graphics option.

EVEREST Ultimate Edition

Version and / or Patch Used: 2006

Developer Homepage: http://www.lavalys.com

Product Homepage: http://www.lavalys.com

Buy It Here

EVEREST Ultimate Edition is an industry leading system diagnostics and benchmarking solution for enthusiasts PC users, based on the award-winning EVEREST Technology. During system optimizations and tweaking it provides essential system and overclock information, advanced hardware monitoring and diagnostics capabilities to check the effects of the applied settings. CPU, FPU and memory benchmarks are available to measure the actual system performance and compare it to previous states or other systems.

With the dual channel memory controller of the EPIA-SN Series we see a marked increase in memory bandwidth, and even better when we use external graphics.