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VIA EPIA CL6000E Motherboard |
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WinXP, Graphics, Performance
Windows XP Professional:
Installing WindowsXP Pro was a fairly simple exercise. The standard WindowsXP Pro SP1A install picked up most of the hardware, with additional drivers required for the second LAN adapter, the onboard soundcard, and the integrated video adapter. Hyperion (4-in-1) drivers are also required, as the motherboard is based on a VIA chipset.
For this review, Hyperion drivers v4.51 and video drivers v16943209 were downloaded and installed. These are both available from the VIA website. The drivers on the supplied CD were used for the onboard soundcard and second LAN adapter. One point to note is that the driver CD won't actually install the network adapter driver, it has to be installed manually from device manager.
 
XP detects the processor as a VIA Samuel 2. The system was equipped with 512MB of RAM, but the onboard video adapter uses system memory as frame buffer. In this case I'd allocated 64MB of memory to the video adapter, hence the system memory total is shown as 448MB. Device Manager shows the dual 10/100 LAN adapters as well as the onboard S3 Unichrome AGP video adapter.
Performance:
Some discussion of the motherboard's performance under WindowsXP Professional is given below, however this motherboard is not aimed at the gaming market, nor is it designed to be a pinnacle of processing power! Benchmark results are shown mainly for interest.
Onboard Graphics:
I didn't benchmark any 3D graphics performance at all. The VIA Unichrome AGP adapter integrated into the CLE266 northbridge of the CL6000E isn't going to play FarCry in 1600x1200 at 100fps, but it's fine for general office applications and other non-graphics intensive tasks. I ran the Windows XP Pro desktop at 1600x1200 and it was quite usable in 2D. There is no AGP slot on the CL6000E, so the graphics adapter is not upgradeable.
This is an aspect of the motherboard that I've deliberately not focused on in this review, as the CL6000E is not intended to be the core of a games machine or a graphics workstation. The integrated video adapter is fairly basic compared to today's high end gaming graphics cards, but it does the job perfectly adequately for its intended market.
SiSoft Sandra Benchmarks:
SiSoft Sandra version 2004.2.9.104 was used to run a few basic benchmarks on the system.
The processor isn't too shabby. Sandra benchmarks the 600MHz Eden processor as roughly equivalent to a Pentium II-300 CPU for integer calculations, but its floating point performance is fairly uninspiring. It's not breaking any records, but then we didn't expect it to. That's not what this system is about.
Sandra benchmarks for the processor in the CL6000E's bigger brother (the 1GHz C3 Nehemiah CPU) are shown for comparison.
We see the same kind of relative performance in the Sandra Multimedia benchmark. Solid, but nothing too exciting.
The Sandra Filesystem benchmark shown is no doubt more a benchmark of the hard drive used rather than anything else, but it's interesting that the drive performed very well in the CL6000E- indeed better than I thought it would. Certainly better than Sandra thought it would as well.
Memory bandwidth was disappointing. A Corsair Value Select PC2700 DIMM was used for this review, and to be honest I thought that even a chipset not built for raw performance would fare a little better. Memory bandwidth is probably not a huge consideration in the market this motherboard is aimed towards, but it's disappointing nonetheless.
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