Small Form Factor EPIA Nehemiah M10000 Issues

Right, first off, sorry if this is in the wrong forum, its HTPC related and i dunno if this is the best place for it.

The Problem:
I bought a EPIA Nehemiah M10000 motherboard a while back and have had it lying around for a while waiting to get built.

Well this weekend was the time and boy was i excited (until the first 2 hdd's i tried were bust and wouldn't load windows.... ANYWAY,

I got that sorted and installed WINXP Pro and all my codecs. Nothing else is on there at all. I set the visual defaults to 'Best Performance' and res to 800x600. Then i tried to play and Xvid avi file... the result = Jumpy video and crappy audio.

Now i was under the impression that this is exactly the sort of thing that the M10000 would handle quite well. To be honest i haven't tried much troubleshooting due to time contraints but i can't even think where to start. The specs of the whole machine are:

EPIA Nehemiah M10000
16x DVD Rom
20Gb Hdd Boot
160Gb Samsung Secondary (the movie drive)
512Mb low profile memory
220Watt PSU

One weird thing is that the RAM is reported as 480Mb in Windows and when booting up something (i assume the Memory or CPU) is being reported as 133Mhz FSB. which i think is wrong.

Thanks in advance for any help. I'm at a complete loss!

 

If its a full resolution DivX/Xvid then the EPIA Nehemiah M10000 is not powerful enough with WIN XP to play it smoothly. The best bit is to re-encode it at a lower bit rate or/and lower resolution or MPEG2 as the EPIA has hardware MPEG assist.

 

Probably crappy codecs? When i had an M10k it played everything i chucked at it. Only uber high bitrates may have problems.

Cut some stuff out of windows (turn off the winxp themes for the classic ones and check visual performance stuff etc) and check what else is running in the background too.

 

I agree with Bindibadgi. Try getting the latest codecs, see if that helps.

My MII 12000 plays anything I throw at it, even over a LAN, flawlessly. This is the codec pack I use.

 

this is all great, cheers!

I'll try the codecs first, if not then i'll use a bigger Mobo and stick a gfx card in.

 

I know nothing of these boards, but the missing ram is probably going to gfx and the bus speed is either set wrong or reporting the bus speed, so if its 2100ddr this makes sense

 

well the codecs seemed to have made some difference. The movies chug along at full screen but look pretty awful.

I'm thinking that my P3 933Mhz might do the job better.

 

Well your partially correct. The missing memory is down to the fact that the 32mb onboard graphics uses shared memory. i.e. it'll steal 32mb of the ddr memory that you put it. A factor I really didn't consider when I bought mine and only put 128mb ram in it

I don't know about the jumpy video streaming, but I could happily stream from mine (I used mine as my server/download box) without any issues.

Oh, mine is a Nemehiah M-1000 btw.

 

Along with disabling the 'themes' service, you can disable a lot more services that are not needed. This guy details what each of the services do and whether you need them or not. If you follow the instructions, you will go a long way towards optimizing windows.

http://www.blackviper.com/

Hope that helps...

 

Its all about optimising - windows has always been crap when it comes to out of the box performance and when your dealing with limited resources like a M1000 then you have to box smarter.

I have XP running DVD's, TV, etc. on a MII6000 which is slower then what you have (although it does have Mpeg2 decoding).

Hunt around for a bit and try to minimise all your services, minimise your memory (tones of google links on all of this stuff)

Good luck