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Zotac's Ion-Based Mini-ITX Board For Atom Debuts
MojoKid writes "There have been a handful of NVIDIA Ion-based products with Intel's Atom processor that have been unveiled recently, ranging from NVIDIA's own reference system, to the
Acer Aspire Revo SFF PC. Today Zotac announced an Ion motherboard that will be appealing to the DIY crowd. The design of this
IONITX-A model board tested and reviewed here in particular, offers some very interesting features, not the least of which is its DC power input with an external power brick. It also is
built on Intel's dual core Atom process for a bit more horsepower to back up NVIDIA's Ion integrated graphics chip."
There's been talk about NVIDIA's Ion since late last year when news first broke of the ultra small form factor platform. At the time, NVIDIA's tiny Atom-powered prototype system wasn't even called Ion yet, but images of the minuscule motherboard that would eventually be used in the reference platform had already surfaced and the community was buzzing with interest. One of the major concerns with most netbooks and nettops was their relatively weak integrated graphics solutions, and Ion would potentially address that concern.
Around the time when Ion was first announced, there was some scuttlebutt that Intel "disapproved" of the platform and that the company wouldn't sell OEMs Atom processors separately, without pairing them to an accompanying Intel chipset. Those rumors were soon squashed, however, because Intel does in fact sell Atom processors independent of a chipset. Although, I think it's still pretty safe to say Intel isn't exactly thrilled with Ion's existence. Regardless of what anyone thinks of Ion though, the platform is moving closer to public availability. I actually took a look at NVIDIA's Ion reference system a couple of months back and in I stated that "I want one - preferably sooner than later".
Well, the wait is almost over...!
=smudge=
Is it just my observation, or is eldavojohn an idiot?
Getting ARM netbooks might prove to be the real MS-Killer that some are wishing for. Windows mobile cannot compete with Linux. If ARM netbooks sell for the under $200 price-point that we were told of, then expect people to happily purchase them and forget that they ever needed windows at all.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
This is what should have happened in the first place.
I have an Intel m-ITX board with the 330, it's nice... I wish it had a PCI-E/16 instead of regular PCI,,,
Could only find an ATI 2400/PCI for it, now that they're out, I might rebuild with a Nvidia 95(6?)00 because ubuntu won't install (complains about memory corruption errors. The. memory. is. OK.).
Intel's graphics are so bad they're criminal.
And please... stop making 230's and just make 330's.
I just hope it's not too expensive,
With a separate power brick made-to-go with this board,,,
A few stand-offs and you can have a nice low-power-draw render cluster.
It'd be even nicer if blender, yafaray, or lux had a branch that took advantage of CUDA as well.
1) Build Netbook that is a) cheap, b) long battery life, and c) ability to play WOW at minimal settings.
2) ???
3) PROFIT!
Seriously though. That is what I want. You build it and I will go buy it.
Likely it will need at least a 10" screen to display without eyes bleeding.
From what I have read the Atom 1.6 just doesn't have the guts to run WOW realistically even at minimal levels.
However WOW is not a game that requires a lot of power to begin with (other than disk space). If it can play WOW it can probably play all my outdated games as well.
a 10" screen, a long battery life, some basic office software, wireless, wow, and decent price.
Doesn't have to be windows based. Linux is fine. You just have to make sure it becomes popular, and a community will help maintain it and provide updates and support. Make a cheap WOW playing netbook, and it WILL be popular.
Anyway that's my 2 cents.
Its main use will be for HTPC. Small, low power and quiet operation while delivering GPU accelerated 1080P content! Not to mention, relatively cheap.
It's going to be an interesting summer with all these ION based mobos and nettops coming out. Love to get a 330 based Acer Revo with an SSD drive (or no HD at all and boot from a 4gb usb stick) and run linux + XBMC.
My only issues with that Zotac combo is that it's too fully featured for me. Once there's some competition, prices should come down as well. You can buy intel 945g micro-atx boards + atom 330 + 2gb ram combos for ~ $80. Right now, there's a pretty high premium for jumping to the ION platform.
The biggest question for me, though, is how well does XBMC with VDPAU run with this?
Just in case anyone is checking, the total power consumption of this puppy is shown as 38 Watts, just a hair above the heat pipe rating for this Coolermaster heat-pipe based case
Who wants to build the first one?
I keep seeing new boards like this come out, hoping one will have all the features I want for an ideal NAS (network attached storage) build. Right now, there is always some trade-off for what I want. Show me the board that has...
One board comes close: the VIA NAS 7800, but it doesn't appear to be available to the general public. And I don't see anything about supporting ECC memory. For no reason other than hearsay, I'm not so sure I'd trust important data to a Via chipset.
The next best, IMO (and I actually have one of these), is the Gigabyte GA-MA74GM-S2. Check out SilentPCReview's writeup on this board. Only problem: I'm not sure if it supports ECC or not (AMD CPUs do, but I've heard it still requires the motherboard vendor to enable it). One annoying problem is that the PCIe x16 slot is for video only---you can't put a SATA controller card, extra NIC or anything else useful to a NAS in there. Still, while it's a very low-power board when paired with the right CPU, it's still overkill for a NAS. In general, I think the power draw for a NAS (excluding the hard drives) should be under 15 Watts.
The Point of View Ion/Atom board linked above looks promising. But, as far as I can see, no compact flash, and probably no ECC memory support.
I've been waiting for somebody to start pairing the dual core atom 330 with nvidia's geforce 9400m for a while. In my opinion, this is more than enough horsepower for the average end-user desktop, htpc, or netbook. And so power efficient too!
I'm seriously considering one of these zotac boards for an htpc, while using an even more power efficient arm netbook (e.g. always innovating touchbook) for my portable linux workstation. The zotac board would also likely serve as a good hackintosh, no?
Via could also potentially profit if they paired one of their up-and-coming dual-core chips with the geforce 9400m.