The BIOS
The EPIA CL10000 uses the Pheonix AwardBIOS, which for many motherboards, has always allowed a good amount of tweaking. There are a fair number of changes you can make with the CL10000, but don't expect a large variety. In the Advanced BIOS Features, you can set your boot order, and some basic system configurations here. The Integrated Peripherals screen allows you to enable or disable items such as IDE channels, sound, LAN and so forth. You can also configure the amount of system memory used for the graphics, with more memory allowing for greater colour depth.
The Frequency/Voltage Control screen displays some of the overclocking options available to you. You can pretty much forget about overclocking the processor, but if you're running PC1600 ram, I suppose you can take a stab at overclocking it to PC2100. You can adjust the memory timings by setting it to manual, and so long as you have quality ram, you should be able to configure some decent timings. VIA allows a surprising high DRAM Voltage, up to 2.9v, though realistically, I don't think you'll need that much.
The PC Health Status screen gives you a quick indication of how your system is doing. As you can see, the Nehemiah processor runs fairly cool.
The Advanced Chipset Feature options are pretty slim, really only allowing you to make some AGP and display adjustments.
Overclocking
Other than the ram possibly (using lower spec'd ram, and forcing it to run faster), you can forget about overclocking the CL10000. It isn't designed for it, and with a 1GHz Nehemiah processor, there isn't much hope in playing todays advanced shooters at an acceptable framerate, even if you were able to manage an overclock.
Test Setup
VIA EPIA CL10000, 256MB PC3200 Crucial Ram, 80GB Maxtor 7200 RPM, Windows XP SP1, VIA 4-in-1 v4.49.
VIA EPIA M9000, 256MB PC3200 Crucial Ram, 80GB Maxtor 7200 RPM, Windows XP SP1, VIA 4-in-1 v4.49.
Test software will be:
Unreal Tournament 2003
Quake 3: Arena
Though most benchmarks should be self explanitory, VirtualDub and TMPGEnc may raise a few eyebrows. We've elected to use these apps as real-world tests, and wrote this small article to explain our testing methodology.
The comparison board will be the EPIA M10000, which is the model that replaces the M9000. I've elected to leave out an AMD or Intel based motherboard for comaparison, because I think it will be rather obvious what kind of scale we're going to see. Feel free to checkout our other
motherboard reviews if you need additional numbers.
SiSoft Sandra 2004
Although a synthetic benchmark, it's a popular one, freely available if you wish to make comparison benchmarks. We will be testing the CPU, MMX, and memory speeds, using the 32-bit 2004 version.
CPU Arithmetic Benchmark
CPU Multimedia Benchmark
Memory Benchmark
It's going to be pretty obvious we're not going to see impressive numbers, but nonetheless, the CL10000 is quite an improvement over the M9000 across the board. The full speed FPU really helps the CL10000 in the memory benchmarks, almost doubling the M9000.
PiFast
A good indicator of CPU/Motherboard performance is version 4.2, by Xavier Gourdon. We used a computation of 10000000 digits of Pi, Chudnovsky method, 1024 K FFT, and no disk memory. Note that lower scores are better, and times are in seconds.
Lower is better
Both boards are fairly agonizing when waiting for PiFast to complete, but the CL10000 is a good 161 seconds faster at computing Pi than the M9000.
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