VIA EPIA M9000 Mini ITX Mainboard

Manufacturer: VIA
Supplied by: VIA
Street Price: ~$145

by Dean Barker (5/22/2003)

Introduction

Take a second and think about how many fellow geeks have full tower cases; quite a few.  Now think about those same folks and ask yourself how many of these people actually need a full tower; not many.  If your friends are like mine, they like big cases because of the appeal they have to both the modder and the regular user to have something a little different.  This in itself has plenty of coolness points.  What you don’t see so often is the other end of that same spectrum.  I mean if people like oversized cases then it stands to reason that some folks would like ultra compact cases.  Anyone can install a system in a box the size of a refrigerator but how about a child’s lunch box?  To undertake this you will need some ultra compact components.

VIA’s Eden boards are nothing new; they have been around but haven’t gotten the press they deserve.  Part of this reason is because the on-board processor (yes, I said on-board) doesn’t have the spank we have gotten spoiled with.  It is even questionable if it could run some modern games that are very very resource intensive.  But the people who look at mini-ITX boards aren’t performance junkies in the raw horsepower frame of thinking.  This may be a shock to you but some people actually build systems to control home entertainment or work on tasks such as word processing or regular internet surfing.  That is where the utility of these boards really shines.

Today we are fortunate enough to have a go with a VIA EPIA M-9000 Mini-ITX mainboard.  The M-9000 has on board, well… everything.  On board processor, video, sound, and LAN are all here.  We are going to put it through its paces to see what the limits of this board are.  Don’t think the mod wheels in my head are being ignored either.  With the M-9000 measuring 170 x 170mm the possibilities are almost endless.  A big thanks goes out to VIA for giving us an opportunity to play with this Eden M-9000 board.  Let’s start things off with some specs.  Its much easer to do a copy/paste from the VIA website.

Specifications

That’s quite a list but again about everything is on-board.

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