To start this review, a massive thanks to VIA for providing us with the sample product. They were even kind enough to supply a motherboard made by Biostar and asked me to point out that C3 compatible boards are available in Europe from both Biostar and Jetway.

A brief history of VIA

VIA Technologies, Inc. is a leading innovator and developer of PC core logic chipsets, microprocessors, and multimedia and communications chips. VIA delivers value to the PC industry by designing, marketing, and selling high-performance discrete and integrated core logic chipsets for the full range of PC platforms, as well as power efficient VIA C3™ processors. VPSD, an autonomous Business Unit within VIA, is charged with the mission of designing, developing, and bringing to market a complete range of platform solutions, including a new line of branded VIA Mainboards, as well as the company's Information PC, Set Top Box, Web Pad and future Total Connectivity designs. VIA is headquartered in Taipei, Taiwan. The company is listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange (TSE2388), and achieved annual revenues of nearly US$1 billion in 2000.
http://www.viatech.com/en/company/overview.jsp

In 1999 VIA 'acquired' the Cyrix company, who had previously made budget CPUs. Cyrix CPUs were shunned by most, although I must admit I had one. I ran a Cyrix 166MX chip for quite a while, a chip which was intended to be their version of the intel pentium 166MMX. It wasn't all bad, although it was definately slower than it's intel big brother. But at the price, it seemed only a small inconvenience. As it happens, the next chip I ran was an AMD K6-2, another largely avoided chip but one that I found very good. One day I really ought to try an intel chip! Anyway, back to the topic at hand.

Cyrix, before their buyout, produced the M2 chip which was post-buyout marketed as the VIA Cyrix MII - another fairly average CPU with quite a small take-up by consumers. The VIA C3 is the next installment in this product line, the Cyrix 3.

C3 Specifications

The CPU via sent me was the C3 866Mhz. Whilst that's a low clock speed in comparison to today's mean machines, at 2Ghz and more, it is by no means paltry. Whilst I don't have any real data to back this up, I'd go out on a limb and say that the majority of "normal" people (and I won't define that, take it to mean what you will) have sub-1Ghz machines. My parents, for example, run a Pentium3 600Mhz. A parent from my old school, for whom I built a machine about 3 years back, still runs the Athlon 500Mhz I gave her. And the users of both of these machines are still happy with what they have. So we can certainly see from that information that super fast processors are by no means a necessity.

Looks

The C3 is of a standard FCPGA layout (flip chip prin grid array), with the same pin arrangement as the FCPGA pentium3 and celeron processors. The C3 series are also (mostly) compatible with motherboards based around those processors. What that means for VIA is they have an easy entry into the market, as they didn't have to rely motherboard manufacturers picking up on a new chipset or socket standard. I say mostly - older motherboards seem to have trouble recognising the C3. I had an intel810 based board, the Gigabyte 6WMM7, which DID work with the C3, but incorrectly detected it as a 633Mhz (if I remember correctly) chip. Via were kind enough to send me a Biostar motherboard, based on a VIA chipset, which (as one would expect) was fully compatible with the C3. So a word of warning if you are on the lookout for a C3 setup, make sure the motherboard is compatible. VIA has compiled a useful list of motherboards they know to be compatible with the C3.

Cost

To compete with the intel celeron and amd duron chips, the competition it is clearly pitched against (the budget CPU market) the C3 would need to undercut them pricewise to get a look in. These days, that's a tricky task, with 1Ghz Duron CPUs available at an incredible £30 or so. The budget CPU market, something the big name chip manufacturers used to pretty much ignore, is now highly contended...

Just a year ago, in september 2001, the Duron 900 (the fastest then) was around £75. In comparison to todays £30 1gig duron the price has more than halved. The Celeron 800 back then was about £70. So as you can tell, the C3 has entered quite a mature market and has a lot of work to do.

In case you're interested, the fastest chip on sale back then was the Athlon 1.33Ghz. And what am I running now as my main machine? An Athlon 1.33Ghz. Who says you need to be at the forefront of technology?

Of course you can't only consider the price of the chip. The chip you choose also dictates your choice of motherboard. And despite AMD chips getting much more mainstream, the motherboards do still tend to cost slightly more than the intel versions. Add to that the fact that AMD chips tend to need more power (so more expensive PSUs) and meatier coolers than intels, which again will cost more. It's here that the C3 has it's main advantage - heat generation. I used to run a Duron 600, and to keep it below 40 degrees (centegrade) in summer was pretty difficult, keeping below 50 was more realistic. I used a ThermalTake Chrome Orb back then, not the best but also not the worst cooler available. But whilst not as noisy as one of those evil Delta fans, it was hardly silent. Dash, who you may know from the forums, got his P3 733 around the same time I upgraded to my duron, and bought a Gold Orb, the intel version of my cooler. Similarly, hardly quiet (although a little less noisy than mine due to a slower fan, I believe). The C3, however, has a huge advantage by not requiring the use of a fan AT ALL.

Heat, cooling

When VIA sent me the C3, they included with it a coolermaster heatsink. Now I'm sure you're all familiar with heatsinks, but what set this one apart was what it lacked - a fan. It's just a slab of aluminium with some fins, nothing more and nothing less. And whilst, after a certain "forgot to plug in the fan then burning my fingers on the fins" incident with my duron-orb combination, I was a little sceptical about running the C3 with no fan, it proved itself able to work perfectly with just the passive heatsink. Impressive, but if VIA can make such a cool running chip, why can't intel and AMD. There must be a catch.

Well, before getting into benchmark test results and the like, using the C3 was a sluggish experience. At first, doing the odd test from time to time left me thinking the C3 was just slow due to it's low clock speed in comparison to my Athlon 1200. But when my trusty 1200 blew up (RIP), due to no-one's fault but my own I might add, I was forced to use the C3 as my main machine. And it really is pretty slow. I remember using my Duron 600 and it feeling quite nippy. But after a week of using the C3 (enough time to climatise, surely) it still didn't feel like it had much grunt. I have been told the C3 isn't fully supported by Windows XP, my operating system of choice, so I thought perhaps this had something to do with it. Well, only one way to test that out - install Windows 98 on it. We'll discuss the results of that particular experiment later on.

Noise

So we've established the C3 doesn't need fan assisted cooling. In my test system, the noise all came from the 2-fanned PSU I had. Since then I have acquired a lower wattage PSU, with just the one fan, and it's much quieter. As another C3 review said:
If you want a computer that can sit in your bedroom and run all night without requiring you to sleep with earplugs, a C3 would be a good processor choice. Set an appropriate hard drive standby delay and install enough RAM that whatever your computer does all night doesn't require it to hit the disk much, and you'll have a computer whose power supply is the only source of sound.
But so what? Why do we need such a quiet PC? Well, whilst it might not matter in a bustling office, or in the background to a loud Counter-Strike session, it does matter in some of the areas of use we are going to focus on with the C3. One of those being Audio-Visual use. A fanless (and small) system finally allows the PC to enter previously untouched areas like the living room. And a PC in the living room can offer a lot - video playback via DivX encoded films and DVDs, music playback via Mp3 files or streaming radio broadcasts, internet browsing and emailing on the TV without all the restrictions inherent in "interactive TV" services or set-top internet boxes, and of course all the other functions of a PC like games, office applications, and whatever else you care for. So, can the C3 do all these things?

Uses

Media - divx/dvd/mp3/vcd
At first, I was using the C3 with the integrated sound and graphics provided by the Biostar motherboard that VIA had sent me. I slapped in the DivX of "Air Force One" (good, if you like that sort of thing) and sat back with a frosty glass of red Fanta and some salt and vinegar Walkers. Things looked good for a few seconds - the black bit at the start when the music has just started. But alas the playback was marred by some pretty bad jerkiness in both the vision and the sound. Disheartened, but not defeated, I put in the DVD of "South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut". Whilst PowerDVD took it's time to get sorted, the DVD playback itself was very acceptable. Occasionally things took a slight dent to framerate, but overall it was a great comeback from the disappointment of the DivX. Mp3 playback was perfect, no problems at all. In fact the on-board sound impressed me, having always been a loather of all things integrated. The VCD test, however, did not go all too well. Whilst DivX had been watchable and DVD was pretty good, VCD was a slideshow of about 1 frame per second.
Sitting on my desk was a graphics card I had bought for just this purpose - a media player for the living room - quite some time ago. An ELSA Gladiac 511 PCI (lucky, since the board has no AGP slot) - a GeForce2 MX card with both dual head (2 monitor) and TV outs. Whilst dual head is a nice but rather over-the-top extra, the TV out is quite a useful addition to the card. Pretty much essential, in fact, to get our PC to output to a television. Funny that.
So I put the GF2 into the machine, over-riding the onboard graphics, and tried the films again. Well, what a difference. DivX was as smooth as I've seen it on any machine, as was DVD, and VCDs played fine as well. So the geforce clearly does a lot of work. Whats more, the gf2 is a pretty old card now, and the MX was the budget version too. So these cards are pretty cheap now - I've seen a card like mine on ebay for £30 (I bought mine 2nd hand about 6 months ago for £50). So our A/V box is still in the running to be quite the bargain.

SOHO
SOHO means Small Office / Home Office. Basically it means a PC used for word processing, spreadsheets, email and the like. Real basic stuff. The C3 is in it's element here, although that's not really much praise as these sorts of computing require very little processor power. It's funny that people buying PCs for this sort of thing are coaxed by clever advertising into buying the very latest technology. Mr Jones with his brand new spanking Dell Pentium4 based machine may just as well have gone into a local shop or browsed the classifieds for an old pentium3 (or perhaps even pentium2) machine and saved some money. Still, it is nice using a faster machine, just the responsiveness of it. Anyway, the C3 gets a big thumbs up for those on a budget looking for an office machine to type up their documents on. It'll even play the odd game of CS when the boss isn't looking.

Router / server
This is another great use for the C3 although, much like an oxford graduate applying to work at McDonalds, one for which it is vastly over qualified. More and more households are getting broadband internet connections, and at the same time more households are finding they have more than one computer. So sharing the connection accross a network is the obvious thing to do. Windows XP actually does a pretty good job with it's inbuilt ICS (Internet Connection Sharing) protocol, but the most secure (and many would say the best) method is to have a computer set aside solely as an internet server for the household. Linux based systems are the favourite for this application, software such as Smoothwall or the Debian distribution are suited to such a task. But whilst the C3 could happily throw plenty of data around a network for you, a very low spec computer (even a 486 based machine) could do it just as well. Machines upto the task can be found all over the place - some favourite haunts of mine are the overclockingstore or bit-tech forums and of course the ubiquitous eBay - for the price of the C3 cpu alone. The extra grunt does mean you could use it for other purposes though, like a living room media player pc which also acts as internet gateway.

Gaming
Last but certainly not least, in terms of CPU demands anyway, gaming. Games these days are real monsters, requiring huge amounts of number crunching power not just in terms of the processor but also a hefty graphics card. So first impressions would be that the C3 doesn't stand a chance. Well, yes and no. Whilst GTA3 was a blurry jerky mess, Counter-Strike, possibly the most popular game in the world (bar some strange japanese RPG), runs perfectly well. Whilst it won't run in the top resolution, bump it down to 640x480 or even 800x600 and, with the gf2mx's help, it runs just as smoothly as you need - a framerate of about 40fps or so. A video shown a while back on VIA's site showed Quake3 running on a C3, and whilst I haven't tried it, their test seemed to run very well. In fact the video demonstrates very well Via's whole "cool processing" ethic. So, for your viewing pleasure, here it is:

beattheheat.wmv (8,559Kb)

Watching that is 1 minute 39 seconds well spent I think, the video comes complete with a superbly selected soundtrack and bafta award winning actor. Ok so there's a little sarcasm there, but it is a good video. I might give it a try myself, I'm not sure I dare though.

So the C3 is up to running yesterday's games, and some of today's, but it doesn't stand much of a chance running tomorrow's. Still, who wants to play anything other than CS anyway?

Benchmarks

I ran some benchmarks on both Windows 98 and Windows XP with the C3. Whilst I had been told the C3 would perform better in Windows 98, the results did not show this. In fact Windows XP got the better scores... I would give you some screenshots for proof but my main machine destroyed the files by kindly formatting the hard disk they were stored on when I tried to mount it on my RAID controller... thanks for that Promise. The 3dMark scores were pretty pathetic using the motherboard's onboard graphics, but the GeForce2MX really picked things up - as I said earlier playing Counter-Strike with the gf2 in was perfectly possible. In 3dMark2000 it actually got a fairly respectable score... 2001/2002 favour the newer graphics cards unfortunately (much to my dismay since I still run a gf2gts in my main machine).

If you're building a machine on a budget, you will obviously need to consider what you want to use it for. For internet routing machines, word processing and light DTP, or DVD players the C3 really does have what it takes. And especially when considering the router and media playback machines, the almost silent running of a C3 based machine is an enormous advantage. A Duron or Celeron based machine at the same clock speed would give you more grunt, but also introduce the problems of effectively cooling the chips. If you're building into the smallest space possible, passive cooling as used on the C3 is far far easier to manage. Building an effective cooling system into a tiny box is possible, but more difficult (and expensive). See the new shuttle cases with heatpipe coolers for an example of a clever method of doing so.
To anyone considering a 'hardcore' gaming machine or heavy graphics work, the C3 isn't really for you. But then the space and heat/noise constraints aren't so important in such a case (haha spot the pun).

Outside projects

The small form factor of many s370 motherboards and the cool running of the C3 allow for some quite radical computer systems. Many people will have seen, or may even own, the Shuttle Spacewalker cases which use flexATX motherboards to give a fully blown PC system at a fraction of the normal size. Here's a few examples of what can be done with the C3 (although many barebone systems - case, psu and motherboard - will accept celerons or P3s as well, the heat may be a problem in such small volumes):

Capax appliance platforms:

Host.net co-lo servers:
"CPU: VIA C3 800MHz (46% Faster then Intel Pentium III 800MHz)" - I'm not so sure about that...

Shuttle Computer Group:

I myself had planned to build a compact plexiglass case for use with the C3. Using an mATX motherboard, a single DVD-ROM drive, hard disk, and a compact PSU means the case can be minute. One day I might get around to it, just a shame life has so many distractions and irritating things that need to be done... like work, that sort of stuff.

In conclusion

It seems that, for VIA at least, the future is small. MiniITX integrated boards and cpus are truly tiny, and open up possibilities for amazingly small computers. The community of 'case modders' have accepted the miniITX form factor with open arms and there are some fabulous examples of PCs using the platform here.

My personal favourite is the PC modded into an old NES case:

(picture gallery)

The future looks quite bright for VIA; a regular check of their website always seems to reveal some new fantastic technology they're working on. They also seem to enjoy good ties with their customers and with the case modding communities, as can be seen on their projects page.

The C3 might not have set the world on fire, but it is certainly a worthy product and definately a step in the right direction for VIA as it has paved the way for smaller quieter and cheaper systems, something which can only be the way forward. If you have read through this article and think the VIA can fulfil your needs, I definately recommend it to you. If you haven't read all the way through, scroll up and do so! If you read through and think I missed something, don't hesitate to take me up on it in the forums.