EPIA-N8000E

Oh come on, admit it! Don’t you just want to adopt the Epia-N Nano-ITX board and start taking it to baseball games and father and son cookouts? Um, maybe that is a little much. Regardless, the specs on this little turkey do appear to be pretty worthwhile for most needs.

At long last, VIA’s Epia-N Nano-ITX boards are hitting the shops, although initially in small numbers. Launched in March 2004, this form factor wowed the media at Cebit in that year, but at the time it was merely a load of components glued to a board with no interconnects, just to prove that they’d physically fit into a tiny 12cm x 12cm form factor.

VIA experienced issues with interference and heat dissipation when it came to making a working board, and took quite a long time to resolve them, during which time the Luke CoreFusion™ platform was launched and became part of the Epia-N design. The Luke CoreFusion integrates the 15mm x 15mm Eden-N processor with a CN400 North Bridge in a single package, allowing for the improved heat dissipation and reduced size called for by the new, smaller form factor. The CN400 North Bridge includes S3 UniChrome Pro graphics (more about that later) and support for DDR 333/400 memory.

Despite VIA claiming that no boards were available, during a phone call they did validate the sighting in Akihabara in Tokyo of one of the boards, so we knew that it wouldn’t be long before they arrived in Europe, and sure enough, soon we were able to pick one up from eBay. This arrived within a week, and we got testing. It transpired that the board was bought from Unity Corp, one of VIA’s distributors, so it was obvious that production boards were going to hit the stores soon. Source: Epaicenter.com

[tags]via,epia-n8000e,akihabara,unity corp,smaller form factor[/tags]