And whats so great about that CPU? Cause honestly my Q6600 sounds better

Uh, yeah, cause every gamer's dream is a motherboard with almost no driver support!

Although nice for specialized applications, there really isn't alot to see here for a gamer.

i'm actually really curious about the performance of the newer VIA C7-D. i remember older VIA processors being "okay" but nothing fantastic. are the C7-D better?

i am mostly looking to make a tiny web server to replace my current ain't-so-great-anymore G4 Cube. C7-D = good? bad?

1.8 GHz C7... a gamer's delight... 'u-Kidding right?

I can see now a top notch gamer sinking an $800 NV-8800 Ultra in this $200 mobo...

Yeah... righ...

Is this like a joke, or does the poster know nothing about PC hardware? Gotta be a joke...no serious PC gamer would even consider this as an option.

John Wayne/Orange County airport just called. You guys are way in violation of noise abatement regulations.

Seriously: NOT for gaming.

But with four SATA ports and a PCI-E slot this could be the perfect board for a tiny, sick as hell HD HTPC with 4TB of storage. Sign me up.

^^^^^^^^^^
Insert Beowulf cluster joke above

@otaking241:

Unless the d does better than the old C7 it will probably bite it in HD too.

Could make nice NAS solution with bit more space and UMPH than other off the shelf products, or for those who aren't really impressed with WinHomeServer. If this puppy can rock fanless, it would be a nice file/web/email server that need not be stuck in the basement to be bareable...

But by the time you flesh it out it would probably cheaper to just buy a used tablet of some kinda and big external HDD...

Um... Yeah. Gamers dream. 1.8 Ghz. VIA CPU.

Is this some kind of sick joke or what?

That's a good one :D Via C7 for gamers hehe
Maybe Mame emulator gamers :)
But... apart from this editors joke ;] this mobo is great. i think it's the greatest via achievement since the begining of the Epia platform. This can really kick ass as an HD HTPC with ability to ... ahh... play some not-that-recent games and do some serious home work.

My ASUS CrossHair board is 10 times the board that shrinky dink is.

What? Mine is an AMD board? No shiite Sherlock.

Tells you how no gamer in their right mind is going to drool over that rig. ROTFFLMMFAO!!!

I've used the older 1.5Ghz model to build a dedicated console emulator, and it worked great, and the driver support is alot better than you would think. I suppose it could be a console RPG gamers triple orgasm (The console RPG gamer I built it for certainly saw it that way). The thing that puzzles me is "WiFi". If you check out the site, it is further obscured to "Wireless Support". According to the spec sheet, it only has a 10/100, and 10/100/1000, nothing about wireless... The only clue is a listing for a Mini-PCI slot on the spec sheet, but I can't find a Mini-PCI in the pictures. That really only leaves the optional cardbus slot, and having tried that before, I can say unless its been reworked, the cardbus slot doesnt provide enough power for a wireless card. The system locked up every time I plugged one into the cardbus (tried Netgear and D-Link), under windows and two different versions of linux. So I'm still fairly confused on what this "wireless" entails...

That is all.

I only had a double orgasm. Does that mean I'm not a real gamer?

While it's been pointed out (many times) that no one is going to use this for games, there are some things that it would be good for. As far as I know, most Via boards don't need big heatsinks, and it's small size makes it great for embedded stuff. Sticking it in your car, a NAS like someone mentioned earlier, there are several things that a small, not blazingly fast (or hot) board can do.

ummm. the C7 is great for some applications and specific tasks, however Speed is not one of them, unless it is for AES encryption because that is FAST on a C7. but small it is also not the smallest there are Nano and Pico and Mobile ITX solutions that are smaller. and there are faster in the pico ITX form, you can buy core 2 mobile mini ITX boards with PCI express 16x, although adding a highend gaming card to any motherboard would negate any energy efficeny as it would use way more power than the rest of the system. This motherboard is great for somethings but The speed thing has to be a joke it must be april fools in someones world. Check out logicsupply.com for what i've found to be the best sellection of form factor mobo's

This is great for a PC in the car. A gaming PC it is not.

I'm not trying to start a flame war here, but the Via C7 is crap. Take a look at the specs, a whopping 128KB of L2 cache. Yes, that is 1/32nd of what is offered on the latest Intel desktop CPUs. Now note that Via advertises it as having about 1.3x the performance per Watt of the Pentium M (Core) processor. They fail to mention that the 1.8GHz C7 uses 18W, vs the 100-200W of an Intel Core2 Processor.

Basically, a 1GHz Pentium III will outperform a C7 in all applications except for encryption. I don't think that Via is billing this as a gaming motherboard, as doing so would be so laughable as to border on criminally false advertising. I doubt you could even run Windows Media Center well on this board (XP Media Center doesn't work well with a 1.6GHz P4, Vista is even worse).

this should be fast compared to a Pentium II or an AMD K6...so this would be great for gamers back in 1999 or 2000.

Whoever posted this blog post doesn't know $h!t.

oh yuri. this might be a gamers delight over in soviet russia. but those of us outside the U.S.S.R. have advanced beyond commander keen and oregon trail

this is would be like getting your 84 toyota camry put on "pimp my ride" and not getting any engine work done.

no self-respecting gamer would ever use a Via CPU.