Date: November 10th, 2003
Article by: Nathan Glentworth (Owner, Head Editor & Hardware Reviewer)
Product was donated by: VIA Technologies
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The CL10000 has the same Nehemiah 1Ghz processor as the previous M10000.

The one major improvement over the m9000 is the CPU upgrade. Not only is it 67Mhz faster, which is not a huge deal, but the core architecture is vastly improved. The 933Mhz C3 processor incorporated into the m9000 was based on the Ezra core which was held back by the CPU's FPU (Floating Point Unit) only running at half of the core speed. The upgrade to the Nehemiah 1Ghz core brought the FPU unit up to full speed and the outdated AMD 3DNow instruction set was replaced by Intel's expandable SSE optimizations. Now this does not pole-vault the m10000 into the performance ranking of the P4 or AthlonXP series of processors which is not its intention, but significantly improves the performance over the m9000.

To accomplish everything the CL10000 is capable of doing, the chipsets had to pull up their socks and take on more tasks than the standard motherboard. To accomplish this, the CL10000 includes the CLE266 (CastleRock) northbridge chipset which acts as more than a controller for the CPU and system RAM. The CLE266 chipset has an included MPEG-2 decoding capabilities and a integrated onboard 2D and 3D graphics processor from SiS. Seeing that this is a multimedia motherboard and the included CPU is not overly fast, the MPEG-2 decoding is handled by the northbridge which leaves the CPU available for other tasks.

The southbridge on the CL10000 varies little from the previous M10000 other than the following:

1.) The CL10000 only has 2 channel stereo sound whereas the M10000 has 6 channel support.
2.) The CL10000 has dual-LAN whereas the m10000 only has a single LAN connection.
3.) The CL10000 has 2 more USB 2.0 connections which replaces the Digital audio and TV-out of the M10000.

The Via VT8235 southbridge is a very common chipset used in motherboards such as the P4PB Ultra or the Soyo P4X400 and adds USB 2.0, 10/100 ethernet and 6 channel sound support.