VIA has been quietly getting on with improving the performance, connectivity and features of its EPIA platform, the most recent of which is the MII1200.
The MII1200 uses the latest version of VIA's Nehemiah C3 CPU, the C5P. The board also features VIA's Padlock Advanced Cryptography Engine (ACE) and an integrated Cardbus controller.
At the heart of the 17cm square motherboard sits the C5P CPU, a 0.13-micron processor that features 20.5 million transistors and runs at 1.2GHz with 64KB of full speed Level 2 cache.
Instead of the 3DNow instruction set used on previous C3s, the new chip uses SSE instructions that should improve 3D performance - as should the use of a full speed floating point unit.
Not only does the board feature a Random Number Generator, but with Padlock ACE there's extra performance for encryption and decryption. It can encrypt or decrypt data at an impressive sustained rate of 12.8Gb/sec. ACE directly supports all three AES key sizes (128, 196 and 256-bit) in hardware without any loss in performance.
Both the VIA Apollo CLE266 Northbridge and the VT8235 Southbridge sit under a passive double heatsink. The CLE266 provides support for a single DIMM slot for up to 1GB of DDR266 memory and integrated S3 Unichrome graphics, which provides only rudimentary 3D performance as it?s primarily a 128-bit 2D graphics engine that has been optimised for multimedia playback.
The Southbridge supports Ultra ATA/133, 10/100Base-T Ethernet, six USB 2.0 ports and 5.1 multi-channel audio.
The back panel of the MII1200 shows just how much you can get on to these small platforms. Including the card reader there are 15ports: two PS/2, serial, VGA, LAN, two USB 2.0, S-Video, RCA, three audio and a single FireWire port.
Contact: Mini-ITX.com
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