Small Form Factor via epia performance?

are these cheapish via epias powerful enough to playback divx, xvid at reasonable source resolutions (tv rips, hdtv high qua rips)?

how about dvd?

i have little to no knowledge about them but saw how "cheap" these things are and im tempted to build a htpc computer out of a 100e epia-5000 (533MHz)

any links or personal experience? please share

 

I've heard some say that they've found it to be unplayable, but I've also heard some say that it's fine. I think it's down to drivers, but I could be wrong.

 

i found a decent review of a epia m10000 mobo, its price is bit more (~160e) but it has an onboard mpeg2 decoder and a 1GHz cpu, and they tested it with divx, xvid and it played all np

(ill post the url when i get home from work, cant find it now )

 

Epia M10000 : http://www.epiacenter.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=21

Epia MII10000 : http://www.epiacenter.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=36

Epia MII12000 : http://www.epiacenter.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=41

Thay all can play DivX and DVD perfectly !

In the other hand, you can buy a PCI special decoder card like that : http://www.mini-itx.com/reviews/xcard/

 

Ive got an MII-10000 and no problems with anything.

 

Have any of you guys tried running a dedicated game server on a mini-ITX board? I'm thinking about getting a MII12000 to use as a htpc/gameserver.

While this model does have a full speed FPU I'm not 100% confident about it managing to run a dedicated game server. Anyone with experience? It would run a Call of Duty server with 12-16 players max.

.johan

 

I had a epia 800 and it play divx fine as well as DVDs the newer one have the mpeg 2 decoder on them that will help with DVDs

 

indeed i had no problems with an EPIA-800!

it depends on the gfx drivers, if ur running linux, its a pain with the old drivers.

The EPIA isn't *that* slow either, its a very well optermised chip, it can do load's of EAX (most commenly used register) faster than the equivilent clocked intel/amd chip iirc.

 

And it kicks for hardware encryption

I'm sure it would have no problem running a gameserver. Unless you have bots they are very low CPU-use.

 

That sounds good. Thanks .

.johan

 

we tried using them as a game server, works fine for stuff like pre steam half-life anything else kills it.

they are very optimised in the ALU (or the first edition ones were, the 800 i played round with was), but lacking in FLOPS.

This means they can add fixed precision numbers very well, and do general code that compramises half of windows, very well for the clock speed. Also they draw very little current!

but there are a lot of times when a standard PIII800 would beat the eden into the ground. Thou with the new gen ones, its not ment to be so frequent.

I can't remeber were it was, it might not of been on usenet (irc mabye) but i had a very intresting chat about it with some really clever asm coders and we looked at where they worked well. but i can't seam to find it was just under alias animus i think.