Date: November 10th, 2003
Article by: Nathan Glentworth (Owner, Head Editor & Hardware Reviewer)
Product was donated by: VIA Technologies
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COMPANY PROFILE

The VIA Platform Solutions Division (VPSD) is an autonomous new business unit established by VIA. Its aim is to provide our customers with a complete set of innovative platform building blocks for building high quality, high performance servers, workstations, PCs, and Total Connectivity devices that meet the needs of all market segments.

VPSD products include both mainboards and reference system designs such as the Information PC and InformationStation. Based on VIA's industry-leading chipset technologies, they not only deliver the highest levels of performance and reliability, but also come with the most advanced features and technologies such as DDR266 SDRAM support. As a result, VPSD products help OEMs and System Integrators increase their competitiveness by speeding up product time to market and reducing validation cycles.

To ensure the highest levels of quality, reliability, and compatibility, VPSD products undergo stringent testing during both the design and manufacturing phases and are built using top quality components. Boards are subjected to an extensive battery of stringent thermal, emissions, stress, environmental, signal quality, and BIOS functionality and compatibility tests across a full range of operating system platforms before being released for production. Manufacturing is carried out using state of the art equipment, and rigorous QA and QC procedures are applied at all stages of the production process.

VPSD products are backed up by a full range of support services through the company's branches and service centres in Taiwan, Europe, and the USA. Distributors and SIs are provided with hot swap RMA, while technical support enquiries can be handled by phone hotline or email.

PRODUCT INTRODUCTION

Since VIA's successful introduction of the Epia Mini-ITX platform onto the world market, computing was given a gentle shove in the right direction. The basic premise which personal computing evolution is based on is advancing performance, increasing capabilities and of course, packing them into an increasingly smaller package. But until the introduction of the Epia, computing was indeed driving forward with breakneck speeds with numerous additional features but size if anything was getting bigger. The basic ATX motherboard today is actually larger than the motherboards released with the initial pentium based motherboards 5-8 years ago.

The motherboard I will be reviewing today is VIA's latest representative of their successful EPIA Mini-ITX line of motherboards that are a fraction of the size of today's standard motherboards, but with the same basic capabilities and features.