Posted 09/19/09 at 05:56:13 PM by Justin Kerr
In the small form factor graphics market, Nvidia’s Ion has been stealing the headlines lately, but it turns out VIA might be gearing up to give them a run for their money. Built on a new standard known as “Pico-ITXe”, the company has released their EPIA-P710, which claims to be capable of full 1080p video playback using nothing more than passive cooling. Of course we were skeptical at first, but they have finally backed up their claims by posting a short clip on YouTube showing the board in action.
Perhaps the most surprising aspect of this new part is how full featured it is given the size. It sports 3 USB 2.0 ports, has both SATA and IDE, as well as Gigabit Ethernet support. As you might expect, the current build is pared up with a VIA C7 1.0 GHz processor, but apparently this is still more than enough to handle anything the VX855 Media System Processor can’t handle video wise.
Looks like this might make for a decent Home Theatre PC motherboard, but we won't know until we see one for ourselves. What do you think?
Links:
[1] http://www.maximumpc.com/user/justinkerr_0
[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2zTCUH-c0c&feature=player_embedded#t=116
[3] http://www.maximumpc.com/article/fast_forward_vias_new_isaiah_processor
[4] http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/netbooks_set_go_dual_core_can_via_and_amd_take_intel’s_atom
[5] http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/nvidia_readying_ion_platform_via_cpus
Comments
Print
Email
