Performance
The VIA Esther processor
is not designed for maximum performance but for
maximum efficiency at the lowest possible power
consumption. True enough, it is known that an
Esther processor is barely equivalent of an old
timer Celeron or Duron, however, the 1.2GHz Esther
will consume less than 10 watts…maximum.
Under normal load and especially with Coolstream
(the equivalent of Speedstep) enabled, the Esther
is expected to consume 2 to 5 watts maximum. Technically,
the LED lights of a case consume more than that.
While
the VIA Epia EN is a promising motherboard, the
integrated Unichrome graphics can hardly be considered
a video card. The 2D quality is excellent, but
3D performance is non-existent. We did not run
any game tests during our testing because when
we attempted to run an older benchmarking application
like 3d Mark 2001, all we faced was extreme stuttering
and a score lower than 1000 points, which is about
30 times lower than what an average video card
can score today. Finally, the integrated adapter
cannot support widescreen resolutions at all at
this time, rendering all widescreen TFT monitors
virtually useless. Hopefully that is going to
be fixed with a BIOS update soon. Concerning games,
you will have to travel back in time to all those
2D RPG and Strategy games of the late 90’s
or use an arcade machine emulator to remember
the times when gaming was really good. Point is
you aren’t going to play Tiberium Wars or
NFS Carbon on an Epia.
For
some basic benchmarking, we used Sisoft Sandra.
During our CPU arithmetic and multimedia tests,
Sandra found our 1.2GHz Esther to be somewhere
in between a 600MHz Duron and a 1GHz Pentium 3.
It ought to be enough for the applications which
this system aims to run. What we really enjoyed
was the SSD disk. Acting much like a USB flash
disk, it is not very fast and can barely catch
up with mechanical 2.5” drives, but on the
other hand it’s performance is very stable
and it has a seek time of >1ms. OS load times
are very decent and overall performance is relatively
good, maybe better than what we expected from
such a drive. As we mentioned earlier SuperTalent
are about to release SATA SSD drives which perform
twice as fast and can easily compete with most
mechanical 2.5” drives. Taking a small glance
into the future, we can see that SSD disks will
slowly penetrate into the mainstream market.
We
also tried the capabilities of our system as an
entirely silent, hidden HTPC. Unfortunately, the
results were average. While the system had no
problems running everyday applications and in
playing most media files, it had a hard time decoding
1080i and 720p high definition movies. 1080i was
entirely unplayable and during the playback of
the 720p video stuttering was easily noticeable.
High definition aside, the system had no problem
playing any audio (MP3, WMA, Audio CD, MPC) or
video (XVID, RMV, DVD disc) we tested. If you
aren’t interested in High Definition Movie
Playback, this system may make the ideal HTPC
for you.
In
order to test the stability of the system, we
connected it to a small UPS and set it to run
as a basic internet PC and a network file server
in order to observe how many days it would last
without a single restart before writing this review.
94 days passed since we received the unit and
it was still up and running without a single issue
during that time, a good indication that this
unit will be able to run 24/7 year in, year out.
That said, since the SSD disk is small for a file
server, we connected a second external 3.5”
disk to it. Remember, the system has not a single
moving part, which means no active cooling. It
would be most successful as an AP node and/or
file server PC without consuming insane amounts
of power, that’s for sure.
