As I mentioned in my recent Lian Li PC78 review, small form factor (SFF) PC's are exceedingly popular these days due to their small size which makes them suitable for a wide range of applications that a regular sized PC just can't handle.

Media boxes to put with your home cinema and stereo equipment to play DivX on your TV, to stream audio across the LAN to your other PC's, as DVD players, the list goes on and on. Also if you have a genuine requirement to save space, a SFF solution can often be a godsend.

With the smaller size, you often get a downsize in performance as a trade off but recent systems, especially from Shuttle, give you AGP slots and support for the latest desktop processors from AMD and Intel meaning storage and optical devices are the only places you find limitations in what you can add to the system.

So with the recent surge in popularity for SFF systems and the fact that performance need not be such an issue, everyone seems to be jumping on the bandwagon with their smaller sized solutions.

VIA are one such company to release a range of solutions to fit your miniature PC needs and it's one such solution, their EPIA M-9000 Mini-ITX product, that I'm looking at today.

Smaller than the form factor used in a Shuttle, Mini-ITX is about the smallest motherboard layout specification you can get for an x86 based computer. Packing a large array of hardware onto such a small space, EPIA solutions certainly don't save on features, giving you everything you'd expect from many a larger motherboard on the market today. But does that mean the traditional reduction in overall performance? I'll be sure to investigate.

So what exactly do you get when you purchase an EPIA solution?