I have a bunch of EPIA 5000's, M6000's (the fanless M), and two M9000's.
I haven't had any problems, *BUT* I don't use sound or the secondary
IDE controller on any of these (except maybe occassionally the sound on my
workstation).
I'm using an M6000 for my workstation, also diskless boot for the quiet.
I consider it 'adequate' as well. Mozilla is a tad slow but still
reasonably useable (and I never put less then 512M in these things anyway
which helps). The 5000 was definitely too slow as a workstation.
The M9000 is far more comfortable but also louder.
The case I bundled it with from idot.com has two small fans and I've
tried disconnecting them but the cpu gets too hot when there is no
airflow at all. It's fairly easy to test the cooling, when you boot
into the BIOS and bring up the cpu temperature display the BIOS is
obviously doing a tight loop, so its equivalent to 100% cpu load and you
can see the effects of various levels of airflow.
I have been running two 5000's continuously for several months. One is
running an ordb nameserver (continuous network traffic 24x7 at around
50KBytes/sec, uptime 104 days) under freebsd and the other is running
linux. Both have small IDE disks. I've had no problems with either
of them.
Another thing to consider is power use. The DC brick that is typically
used with the M6000 and the little 60W supply typically used with the 5000
can't produce what a normal PC power supply can and would probably have
issues if you load up the peripherals (e.g. HD, CD, and a high-end video
card).
Finally, people tracking this thread should keep in mind that the only
reason one ever gets these EPIA cards is for (A) quiet and (B) low
power usage. If you want something faster even a low-end Intel or
AMD based box will beat the EPIAs out hands down. I do most of my work
over xterm's and ssh to the machines in my server room. But I like my
office to be as quiet as possible.
-Matt
Matthew Dillon
<dillon at backplane.com>
:> Yes, I have had these problems too. And even the HDD controller has
:> done some pretty mysterious stuff.
:
:Mentioning the HDD controllers...I've not used any official Via boards,
:but I've had my hands on a few other systems using the EPIA chipsets and
:embedded CPUs...(600 and 933 samuel 2s)
:
:What sort of HDD problems have you seen?
:
:
:I've seen complete system powerdowns related to IDE writes to the
:/secondary/ controller when using solidstate flash media. (DOMs and CF)
:
:We have realtek nics on these, so I cannot comment on the vr drivers. :)
:
:Our vendor said that Via confirmed problems with the secondary IDE
:controller...our vendor wasn't able to get a solution from Via so they
:redesigned the board to use the primary IDE controller for the flash.
:
:I don't know for sure that this applies to the EPIA boards, but it'd be
:worth a check if you're using flash media.
:
:
:....david
:
:
:---
:david raistrick
:drais at atlasta.net http://www.expita.com/nomime.html