Today we are looking at the quietest board in the EPIA M-Series family : The VIA Epia M-E6000. We already looked at the M-9000 and the EPIA-800 but I must admit I was surprised at the performance of this little board. Read on to find out why.

Clearly the new M-Series has been designed with a purpose in mind. Its small, 17cm x 17cm in fact.It uses the VIA Apollo CLE266 chipset which features an embedded MPEG-2 decoder designed to help in creating smooth DVD playback. Although this chipset has integrated 2D/3D graphics it is not designed for games. The chipset also supports DDR266 SDRAM and, ATA/133, USB2 and Firewire. On the audio side of things we have support for (6 Channel Audio) 5.1surround sound, courtesy of the onboard VIA VT1616 6 Channel AC'97 codec. The M-Series has addressed many of the issues that have cropped up in this quest for the Home Theatre PC. As you can see VIA have moved away from letting the CPU handle every part of the multimedia operation. The have combined the virtues of each component to bring the needed multimedia features in to the home in and economical and quiet fashion.

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