VIA EPIA M10000 Board Review - More Photos of the Board
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No matter where you look around this board, things are bunched together.... Look around the Floppy connector; there are a lot of items stuffed in such a small area. There are capacitors all over the place. Look how close these are to the mounting hole.
Here are some more views of just how tight things are around this board. When you first glance at this board, you will probably think it has 2 PCI slots, but there is only 1 PCI slot. The picture above shows how close the IDE connectors really are. I tried to fit a business card in there and couldn't get it to fit very easily.
These low power M10000 (Nehemiah) CPU's run very cool, and this very low RPM fan is super quiet, but does an excellent job cooling this 1Ghz CPU. Just about the most room you have on this board is around the front connectors, which is a good thing in my opinion.
To help save room, VIA has mounted the CMOS battery in the upright position. There are some good and bad points about this mounting position. The good thing is that is saves PCB real estate for the board maker, but a bad thing is if you're not careful you can snag the battery on a cable during mounting and really do some damage. Also, in the two pictures above you can see the heatsink that VIA uses to cool the chipsets on this board. So far under all the testing that I have done, this passive heatsink did not get really warm to the touch.
This photo shows the backplane and all the onboard items that you get. You get your everyday PS2 Mouse, Keyboard connector. There is also an onboard VGA VIA S3 UniChrome AGP connector, VIA 10/100 Base T Ethernet, VIA VT1616 6 Channel AC97 connectors, VIA VT1622 TV RCA Out, and 2 USB 2.0 connectors.
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