I was pretty impressed with how snappy the M10000 felt when doing web surfing
and other general computing tasks. I did run some synthetic benchmarks using
SiSoft’s Sandra benchmarking tool, which just serves to underline the fact that
this small form factor board isn’t a hot rod muscle machine.
WCPUID stats, Sandra Multimedia and CPU Arithmetic benchmarks
Not to belabor the point but the EPIA M10000 is not meant to be an uber-gaming
rig. It’s designed to be a tiny, cool, and quiet multimedia machine. Generally
you’d still need a fair amount of CPU horsepower to handle multimedia functions.
The 1Ghz CPU coupled with the built in MPEG hardware accelerator (more on the
“accelerator” in a minute) is snappy enough to handle most of your media playback
needs without missing a beat. It’ll play mp3’s without breaking a sweat. MPEG2
files as well as DVDs playback just fine without over taxing the CPU or dropping
frames. Small and medium resolution DivX files truck on pretty well (60 – 100%
CPU utilization). If you have large resolution DivX or MPEG4 files you might
be asking too much of the little CPU and get dropped frames, and audio sync
issues.
The M10000 playing back MPEG2 via software only decoding
(note: the screenshot didn't capture the MPEG2, but trust me it's playing)
Because of the M10000’s limited horsepower, the only way to get reliable TV
encoding/recording is to use a hardware-based encoder like Hauppauge’s WinTV
PVR 250/350. I used a PVR350
for this project because it is what I had handy. You can of course use other
tuner/capture cards as long as they have built in hardware encoding.
Utilizing a hardware-based encoding tuner card the M10000 did not break a sweat
recording television programming at all. That’s mostly a function of the quality
of the tuner card, but it’s important to point out that you can indeed record
high quality hardware-based encoded MPEG2 on the somewhat pedestrian CPU on
the M10000. In fact I had no problem recording one show while watching a previously
recorded program even with the slight added overhead of running SageTV 2.0 PVR
software/front end. That is a critical performance threshold to be considered
if you are trying to use the M10000 as a TiVo-esque device. Which is the whole
point of this review =).
A lot of people in the BYOPVR community (myself including up to recently) have
been mistakenly referring to the embedded MPEG-2 Accelerator generically as
a “hardware decoder”. It is not a full on MPEG decoder. It would be more accurate
to think of it as hardware assist decoding chip. It’s a subtle but important
distinction. It does help with MPEG2/DVD playback performance, BUT you really
have to have specific drivers installed and software that supports the hardware
assisted playback.
The documentation is scarce/nonexistent on how to take full advantage of the
M10000’s hardware accelerating MPEG2 decoding capabilities. I’m still not sure
if I was utilizing the built in MPEG2 hardware acceleration or not. I believe
I enabled it through some registry
tweaks found in some obscure forum post hiding under a rock somewhere, but
it only provided a modest improvement in playback CPU performance (10% - 25%
less CPU utilization on average). Since the MPEG acceleration is one of the
cooler/desirable features of the M10000, I was a little under whelmed. It’s
useful and an important feature, I just expected more of a performance boost
and less hassle enabling it.
DVD playback using powerDVD (bundled DVD player software with my OEM DVD burner
- I don't recommmend it) with hardware acceleration enabled was between 20%
– 40% CPU utilization (without hardware acceleration 35% – 65% utilization).
The TV out drivers left me a little under whelmed as well. I couldn’t overcome
some of the black boxing/overscanning when using the S-video out with the included
VIA utilities. I had to choose between having a black bar at the top of the
screen, or the screen that was blown up way too big, with no granularity of
control for positioning or size of the TV output.
