EPIA MII 12000 Review

Posted on May 18, 2004

Jump to: Introduction The Nehemiah C3 CLE266 Chipset Box and Drivers Cardbus and Back Panel Board Connectors BIOS Settings Cooling & Power VGA & TV Output Benchmarking Details Sandra Benchmarks More Benchmarks AES Benchmarks Video Playback Audio Quality Conclusion

PCMark 2002

Futuremark's PCMark 2002 is a multipurpose benchmarking tool, suited for benchmarking all kinds of PCs, from laptops to workstations. PCMark 2002 performs tasks such as image compression, text searching and audio conversion.

PCMark detected the faster CPU of the MII 12000, and scored it top in its memory test, though with slightly different results to Sandra for the other boards - but it did spot the very slightly slower EPIA TC memory (or memory architecture). This was confirmed with the HDD scores - the EPIA TC wasn't quite as efficient as the other boards in this area.

3D Mark 2000

Futuremark's 3DMark 2000 measures DirectX 7 performance with several 3D game demos and tests. The test is getting rather long in the tooth now, but we have previously tested using this benchmark so kept it in for old times sake. We measured using the standard 1024 x 768 default settings.

The EPIA M 10000 performed best here, followed by the EPIA CL, with the EPIA TC bringing up the rear. This surprised us a little, but it's only a benchmark - and DirectX 7 games are getting increasingly rare.

3D Mark 2001 SE

Futuremark's 3DMark 2001 SE measures DirectX 8 performance with several 3D game demos and tests. The boards all buzzed along at double figure framerates, giving a smooth but still jerky picture - with the EPIA CL favouring this particular benchmark. However these results will disappoint games players. Hopefully the 3D graphics ability of the next generation CN400 chipset will be an improvement on the CLE266 VIA have used in this generation of boards.

Rip WAV to MP3

In another real world test, we used dBpower AMP Music Converter to convert a 70MB WAV file to an MP3, using the default settings. By ripping from the hard disc and not a CD, we removed the CD from the test and concentrated more on the raw power of the CPU. A similar task would be compiling a Linux kernel. The MII was 20% faster than the other boards at 148 seconds. A modern Pentium or Athlon CPU will do the same test in under a minute, but this is certainly a step in the right direction.

Quake 3 Arena

The CLE 266 based EPIAs are not 3D games machines, but if stuck on a desert island with one for company, we might want to load up a copy of Tribes with all the settings turned down for a slice of retro disc-mining. We dug out Quake 3 Arena and installed the 1.32 point release to perform some industry standard 3D benchmarks. We also tested with an optimised frame rate configuration.

To run this demo at home, load Quake, find out what a tilde is, then press it. Type "timedemo 1", then "demo four", rinse and repeat. Modern rocket-powered graphics cards can manage 10 times these scores - the EPIAs make do with their own on-board graphics.

These are the results with the optimised frame rate configuration. A little better and certainly playable, but not beautiful. Modern games suck the lifeforce from any graphics card not up to scratch, and EPIA integrated graphics fall into this category. If you really intend to play games on your EPIA, we would suggest investing in a decent PCI graphics card (NVidia based cards are much more stable on the EPIAs in our experience).

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