|  | September 05, 2017
Choosing the right DC-DC PSU August 27, 2015
AMD's Project Quantum August 13, 2015
The Redstone PC is the ultimate Mini-ITX Minecraft Machine October 09, 2014
The "Restomod TV" April 09, 2013
Installing NAS4Free February 28, 2013
Building an XBMC 12 Home Theatre PC January 25, 2011
XBMC Guide updated to version 10.0 August 06, 2010
Building a Green PC February 15, 2010
Building an ION powered HTPC with XBMC October 10, 2008
The "Cambridge Autonomous Underwater Vehicle 2008" |
| | | | September 12, 2008
"Florian", the DVD burning robot September 05, 2008
The "i-EPIA" May 22, 2008
The "GTA-PC" April 14, 2007
The "Digg" Case January 19, 2007
The "ITX-Laptop" December 07, 2006
The "Tortoise Beetle" October 02, 2006
The "DOS Head Unit" August 31, 2006
The "Janus Project" August 05, 2006
The "Leela PC" June 26, 2006
Nano-ITX in a Football May 17, 2006
The "EPIA Alloy Mod" April 11, 2006
Neatorama's Collection of Case Mods February 18, 2006
The "Rundfunker" October 24, 2005
The "ITX TV" October 06, 2005
The K'nex-ITX August 05, 2005
The "Waffle Iron PC" July 21, 2005
The "Supra-Server" July 18, 2005
The "Mega-ITX" July 07, 2005
The "Encyclomedia" May 25, 2005
The "Accordion ITX" |
| | | | May 16, 2005
The "FileServerRouterSwitch" May 15, 2005
The "Mini Falcon" May 13, 2005
The "Bender PC" May 11, 2005
The "BBC ITX B" May 10, 2005
The "Frame" April 20, 2005
The "Jeannie" March 09, 2005
The "Cool Cube" January 30, 2005
First Nano-ITX Project? January 17, 2005
The "iGrill" January 15, 2005
The "Gumball PC" December 15, 2004
The "Deco Box" December 03, 2004
The "TERA-ITX" October 06, 2004
The "Coealacanth-PC" September 17, 2004
The "Gramaphone-ITX-HD" August 26, 2004
The "C1541 Disk Drive ITX" August 25, 2004
The "SEGA-ITX" August 13, 2004
The "Quiet Cubid" August 06, 2004
The "BMWPC" July 14, 2004
The "Moo Cow Moo" July 02, 2004
The "Mini Mesh Box" Full alphabetical archive on right hand side of page... |
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VIA EPIA N10000 Nano-ITX Review
Summary and Conclusion
We know you skipped the rest of the review and went straight to this page. So we'll just recap what we now know:
The N10000 is the first Nano-ITX board from VIA, measuring just 12cm x 12cm. It is partly intended for industrial and embedded applications, but the interest in Nano-ITX is so great we have had to also review it as a consumer board.
The N10000 fulfils some of its promises. It is whisper quiet, consumes very little power and is incredibly small.
The Padlock functionality on the board is fully realised, and that feature alone will attract some specialist customers.
Today's customer however expects HDTV playback ability, and the N10000 cannot currently provide this out of the box. The 1GHz Luke CPU is clearly not powerful enough to do this in software, but it was always VIA's intention to support this in hardware. The MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 acceleration abilities of the CN400 are not easy to access, and lack decent software support in both Windows and Linux. If VIA worked to provide this, the N10000 could be an entirely different machine, and a capable media playback device. Let's hope that we are proven wrong sooner rather than later.
As a sign of things to come, the N10000 is an encouraging start. For any manufacturer to engineer an 8 layer board in these dimensions and populate it with a CPU and chipset of their own design is an impressive achievement.
Pros
Small size - 12cm x 12cm
Low power consumption - less than 20W
Low noise - around 20dbA
Chipset has potential for MPEG-2/4 acceleration
6 Channel Audio and many HDTV resolutions
DVI possible in theory, using daughterboard
Very fast security features
Cons
Limited MPEG-4 codec support from VIA
No printed manual
Price may be limiting factor? (typically around $350 - $400)
Not many enclosures currently support Nano-ITX
No Firewire, Optical Audio, DVI or HDMI outputs
Only one SATA socket - not enough for RAID
Pushpins for mounting heatsink not particularly strong
Many thanks to Ivor and Jake for their assistance (and patience!) with parts of this review.
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