Epia EN15000G experiences?

[Praetor]

I'm thinking about picking up an Epia-EN15000G and using it as a MythTV frontend. Does anybody have any experiences with this board in either Windows or (preferably) Linux?

 

[cheesehead]

I have no experiences with this unit, but I can tell you that the C7 is roughly equivalent to a Dothan at the same clock speed. Seeing as how Pentium-M based boards start at 250$ without CPU, it's not a bad price.

As the Newgg page says, Linux support for the video cards is lousy, so you're stuck unless your video card does PCI. (The PVR-350 has an integrated TV out, so if you're using it with a TV, you're set.) I don't think the default driver supports the TV-out ports.

Also, these boards are reported to suffer a very nasty problem on the audio output.

If you just want to play video, an older Epia board with a 600mhz processor will do just fine. If you want to do a full PVR setup, try scoring a Pentium-M based Mini-ITX board, and a dual-core pentium M when someone upgrades their CPU. A dual-core 1.66 Pentium M will beat the pants off of a single-core C7, and driver support for Intel chipsets is a no-brainer.

 

[Praetor]

Originally posted by: Cheesehead
I have no experiences with this unit, but I can tell you that the C7 is roughly equivalent to a Dothan at the same clock speed. Seeing as how Pentium-M based boards start at 250$ without CPU, it's not a bad price.

As the Newgg page says, Linux support for the video cards is lousy, so you're stuck unless your video card does PCI. (The PVR-350 has an integrated TV out, so if you're using it with a TV, you're set.) I don't think the default driver supports the TV-out ports.

Also, these boards are reported to suffer a very nasty problem on the audio output.

If you just want to play video, an older Epia board with a 600mhz processor will do just fine. If you want to do a full PVR setup, try scoring a Pentium-M based Mini-ITX board, and a dual-core pentium M when someone upgrades their CPU. A dual-core 1.66 Pentium M will beat the pants off of a single-core C7, and driver support for Intel chipsets is a no-brainer.

The newegg review also says he was able to use the vesa driver up to 1600x1200. This would be running 640x480 on a tv. I haven't had any experience with the vesa driver as I've made sure my other htpc's have used nvidia cards. And nvidia's support has been great for me.

I don't want to use a PVR card for video out or even put a card in here, as newer releases of Mythtv are moving to an OpenGL interface and won't be supporting the PVR cards as well.

As for the Intel boards, I'm wide open to the possibility of picking up a Micro/Mini-itx board from then. I'm having a slightly difficult time finding one with tv-out built-in to the board though. Suggestions?