VIA Announces The Epia LT Platform

Although some 10 years ago VIA was an important chipset producer and integrator in the latest two years the presence of this producer on the motherboard and CPU market was almost nonexistent. If you remember the days of Athlon XP you probably also remember the KT600/KT880 series and its success as a motherboard. Well, one could say that this particular platform was the latest one successful enough to compete against Nvidia and INTEL.

As times passed, VIA gave up its entire market share in the desktop segment. However they didn't stop producing motherboards. Instead they reoriented all their production lines towards energy efficient CPUs and motherboards based on the EPIA ITX / mini-ITX standard. And now VIA is ready to launch another Epia.

The new Epia LT-series arrives in 1.5 GHz and 1.0 GHz forms with the CPUs "glued" to the motherboard as is the case with all Epia Mobos. Dubbed the Epia LT15000AG and LT10000EAG series, the new LT-based products have the unique ability to power dual displays using the native LVDS interface. Behind the proprietary interface VIA uses the classic UniChrome Pro II AGP IGP also found on the CX700 motherboard series.

Besides the dual-view functionality, the UniChrome chipset can also work with a TV-Out header but in order to have that integrated onto your Epia LT board you will have to buy a custom version of it based upon the VIA CX700M2 chipset. Aside from the video output, the board also comes with dual VT6107 10/100 Ethernet (there's also an optional VIA VT6122 Gigabit Ethernet controller). Other features include two SATA, one IDE, integrated VT1708A HD audio, one PCI slot and one DDR2-533 header. No words on the prices yet but according to VIA the product should be available in a matter of weeks.

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