Zotac's Ion: The World's First mini-ITX Ion Board

Zotac's Ion vs. Intel's D945GCLF2 in Application Performance

Up to now I focused on Zotac's strengths but how does the platform compare across the board to the far cheaper Intel D945GCLF2? Zotac's Ion supports faster memory (DDR2-800 vs. DDR2-533), more memory (4GB vs. 2GB), has a much faster GPU and uses a newer SATA controller. What does that translate to in the real world? The next few pages of benchmarks will show us just that.

I ran through my benchmarks with both 4GB and 2GB of memory installed in the Zotac Ion to see if there was any difference. Most of my benchmarks showed no performance difference so I performed all of the Ion tests with 4GB of memory while the Intel based Atom boards used 2GB, the maximum that you can use in those systems.

I compared performance between the Zotac Ion, the Intel D945GCLF and the D945GCLF2. For reference I included a 1.6GHz Intel Celeron 420 and a 2.0GHz Intel Celeron 440 as well as the recently released Pentium E5300. All of these chips sell for between $30 - $70 but they are all based on modern day out-of-order, speculative execution cores. Remember that the Atom is an in-order processor, long proven not to be the fastest design for absolute performance.

All benchmarks were run under Windows Vista. The rest of the systems use the same configuration as our normal CPU reviews.