Testing
Obviously, the Epia MII is no ordinary motherboard, for no ordinary system, and thus testing it in the manner you are used to seeing at HEXUS would be not far short of pointless. As we have already mentioned, one of the main aims of a Mini-ITX system such as this is for use as a media centre PC or the like, and thus we chosen to run some basic tests on the system to test this functionality, namely in the form of some video playback tests.
Firstly however, it should be noted that an Epia system can run any x86 Operating System, be it Linux or Windows, and run it pretty respectably. For our testing here we've stuck with Windows XP Service Pack 2, and together with 512MB of DDR-RAM performance during both installation and overall use of the OS was perfectly acceptable, and certainly usable for everyday tasks. This means that the Epia could also quite easily be up to use as a file server or the like if you so wished.
Now, on to our testing. We started by taking a look at DVD playback, and the kind of quality and performance our Epia system would offer. As the CLE266 north bridge is capable of hardware MPEG-2 decoding, CPU utilisation here should be relatively low. Initially, I attempted to test using the latest version of CyberLink's PowerDVD software, PowerDVD 6, but found that no matter what, the system would hang when trying to play a DVD disc with hardware acceleration enabled. With acceleration disabled, the disc played fine, but obviously without hardware assistance plackback suffered from a lot of skipped frames and very high CPU usage.
So, I moved on to trying InterVideo's WinDVD 6, with much better results. Using this software, hardware acceleration worked perfectly, and the DVD in question (Monsters Inc, in case you wondered) played flawlessly - Looking great and with no skipped frames. CPU usage varied somewhat, but never ventured too far above 30%, showing an overall average of 27.8% - An impressive result, as you would perhaps expect thanks to the hardware decoder available.
We then moved onwards - In this day and age MPEG-2 isn't the only codec of choice, as MPEG-4 has become increasingly popular thanks to the success of DiVX and the like. So, we've also checked out a near-DVD quality MPEG 4, encoded from the DVD itself. Using Media Player Classic, CPU utilisation was, as expected, some way higher than that seen with MPEG-2 DVD playback, at an average of 48%, spiking up into the 50s at times. However, this is still pretty respectable in the performance department, and allowed for smooth playback of the file without any dropped frames or other issues.
All in all then, the Epia MII matches its claims to being a good candidate for media centre usage.
