VIA EPIA M9000 Mini ITX Mainboard

What you get

Included with the M9000 board is a bracket with two USB 2.0 ports and two Firewire ports, floppy and ATA133 ribbon cables, I/O plate, driver CD and very comprehensive manual. 

Layout

The heart of the M-9000 is an on-board 933 MHz VIA C3 processor operating on a 133MHz bus.  You can see the 40 x 40 x 10mm copper colored aluminum heatsink/ fan sitting on top.  Its looks are reminiscent of the Pentium sinks of old.  The VIA C3 E-Series processor can get away with this because of its extremely low power consumption.  Remember that the power supply units typically associated with these chips are under 200 watts; sometimes significantly under this.

The CLE266 Northbridge on the M9000 sports a very large heatsink similar to the oversized numbers we see on AOpen boards.

A single DIMM slot rests on the right side of the board providing for up to a gig stick of RAM.  The M9000 DIMM slot only allows for PC2100 (DDR266) memory.  In the era of DDR400 and even DDR433 this seems pretty weak.  But remember, this board is built for compact utility instead of flat out performance.  Even if the board could handle and use DDR400 the M9000 remains based around a 933 MHz C3 processor.

Graphics are handled by an integrated VIA CastleRock AGP controller and a MPEG-2 decoder.  This helps take some load off the processor for video playback operations.  Now you can forget about banging north of 100 frames per second playing Unreal Tournament but as far as audio/video ops you have plenty of beans in the bank.

One of the improvements VIA put into the M9000 board was the addition of six channel sound courtesy of the VT1616 chip.  This is up from the two channel audio that was on the M9000’s predecessors.  On-board NIC?  Absolutely.  Thank the VT6103 10/100 chip.

The M9000 has four power connectors strategically placed on the board, two three pin, one two pin and a smaller three pin akin to a header you would see on a VGA card.  One of the three pin connectors is used by the CPU fan.  With everything being onboard I’m not exactly sure what you would need the extra fan headers for.  The PCI slot superficially may seem unnecessary but a large part of the mini-ITX board market are people wanting to control home entertainment with it.  These are the same folks who scoff at on-board sound the way a gamer scoffs at on-board video.

Rounding out our look at he tiny VIA’s layout is the IDE channel connectors.  Two ATA133 connectors are on the outer right edge of the board which keeps the ribbon cables out of the way and your case tidy.  The floppy connector is almost smack dab in the middle of the board (the middle of the board is no further than 4 inches from the edge.)  With all the components vying for space, the floppy controller lost out but it still has to go somewhere.  Check out the battery.  Everything and I mean everything is about compactness.

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