Zotac's Ion: The World's First mini-ITX Ion Board
by Anand Lal Shimpi on May 12, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Zotac’s Ion in My Theater
Last year I spent a lot of time building a home theater. All content is played back on my HTPC running Windows Vista Media Center along with MyMovies (to catalog my library) and VMC Media Browser to tidy up the interface. The hardware is composed of an ATI Radeon HD 4550 as well as an Intel Core 2 Quad Q9650. The result works pretty well. I wanted to see how close the Zotac Ion could get to my setup.
With an external power supply I didn’t have to do much, I just grabbed the Zotac board and the power brick, set the two on top of my equipment rack and plugged it in. I immediately appreciated the silence of the Zotac, as quiet as I’ve made my HTPC, it’s still not totally silent. That doesn’t usually matter while I’m watching a movie, but whenever I pick the seat closest to the equipment rack it irks me a bit (similar to how you can always notice even the most minor scratches on your car).
Actual video playback wasn’t an issue, the Zotac board already passed all of my Blu-ray tests if you’d remember. And I rip all of my content so CPU usage never even went beyond 20%. What I wanted to know was how well the Zotac board could handle navigating through my library, the VMC menus, etc...
I for sure thought that the Atom was too slow to serve as a real HTPC. Sure you could watch movies on it, but actually navigating through your library using a pretty UI - no way.
I must admit, I was pleasantly surprised.
Quantum of Solace - 1080p - 11' screen - all powered by Zotac's Ion
The Zotac Ion was by no means fast at navigating through the Media Browser interface, but it was acceptable. Scrolling through tens of movies is a bit painful, make it hundreds and you may want to consider a faster CPU, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected.
The VMC Media Browser interface, slow, but usable on the Ion
During playback I could pause, skip forward and adjust volume without dropping any frames. The Ion worked as a real HTPC doing real duty. I was impressed. Pair it up with a TB hard drive and you have a great way of watching your content on your TV or projector. Use a NAS and you can even keep all the noise out of your theater room.
Performance aside, remember that this is a GeForce 9300 we’re talking about here. I had a single HDMI cable going to my receiver which carried 1080p video, DD or DTS 5.1 audio or 8-channel LPCM if I decided to let my machine do all of the decoding. I didn’t test CPU utilization on the latter due to time constraints but I plan to in the near future.
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ISHOULDCOCO - Thursday, May 14, 2009 - link
"In my quick testing the temperature of the heatsink did reach as much as 70-75C so I would use the fan in just about any installation locations." taken from PCPER.COM review"During Blu-ray playback, GPU temperatures rose to 72°C with the CPU cores between 76 and 79°C." Taken from TECHREPORT reveiw
Was this device tested WITHIN a case?
Is it truly a practical long-term Passivly cooled motherboard ?
COCO
ISHOULDCOCO - Thursday, May 14, 2009 - link
"In my quick testing the temperature of the heatsink did reach as much as 70-75C so I would use the fan in just about any installation locations." taken from PCPER.COM review"During Blu-ray playback, GPU temperatures rose to 72°C with the CPU cores between 76 and 79°C." Taken from TECHREPORT reveiw
Was this device tested WITHIN a case?
Is it truly a practical long-term Passivly cooled motherboard ?
COCO
strikeback03 - Thursday, May 14, 2009 - link
Did they mention what software they were checking that with? On my LF2 motherboard Speedfan is pretty much worthless, says fan readings are all over the place when it is at a constant speed and says the core temperatures are around 5 deg C.Otherwise, airflow in tiny cases can vary greatly, what cases sis those sites use?
TA152H - Wednesday, May 13, 2009 - link
I'm not sure the Pentium 4 is a few years old, since "few" generally means little more than one, not seven. The Northwood 2.66 came out in 2002.Even three years ago, you'd be comparing it to Pentium 4s running in the mid to high 3 GHz range, with dual cores, and hyper threading, and 200 MHz bus.
The Atom needs a better chipset choice. Intel's is obsolete, and Nvidia's is, well, Nvidia's. Who'd want either?
So, we're stuck with terribly slow processor paired with an obsolete, power hungry chipset, or we have to suffer with an Nvidia based chipset to get something more modern. What a choice. And, is the Atom so big they can't make it a real dual-core processor?
Intel had a good idea, but their execution has been horrible. Centaur solutions are better, even though I'm inclined to think the Atom is a good processor for a market it can't hit because of bad chipsets available for it. It's taking Intel too long to get out a decent chipset.
I'd like to see the Supermicro server motherboards reviewed with the Atom. For file serving, the Atom is fine, and the low power is very good. With a good chipset, this would be an ideal product for file servers. Heck, I run my webserver/gameserver with a K6-3+ 500 MHz (I'd still like to see AMD make a K6 derivative that competes with the Atom, instead of a K7/K8 based one that can't possible win) and it never gets pegged. Some workloads are perfect for the Atom. ... if they can get a !$#%!@#$ chipset for it that's decent.
Obsolete or Nvidia. Dumb or dumber. Good grief. This is something you'd expect from AMD.
strikeback03 - Thursday, May 14, 2009 - link
There is a more modern chipset for Atom, the US15. Almost no one seems to be using it though, not sure if it is just the cost or more artificial Intel limitations.Don't think Atom is really available to just be dropped in a motherboard, so if Supermicro makes a motherboard with an Atom processor in it then they could test that configuration. Otherwise probably out of luck.
Pandamonium - Thursday, May 14, 2009 - link
I happen to be very interested in this pairing. What's wrong with nVidia? Do you have any specific reasons?Intel's atom chipsets are pretty obsolete; I'll give you that. If Intel had an Atom chipset with a X4500HD IGP, I'd be interested. But as it stands, this is the next best alternative.
hamiltonguy - Wednesday, May 13, 2009 - link
I am intrigued about the possibility of using this as small secondary 7MC media center. curious about Live HD TV performance.StraightPipe - Wednesday, May 13, 2009 - link
Anybody know of some decent cases for this type of mobo?I'd love to see a couple of boxes for a HTPC and/or a carputer.
strikeback03 - Thursday, May 14, 2009 - link
You check out the usual suspects? mo-co-so.com, mini-box.com, logicsupply.com, etc...dman - Wednesday, May 13, 2009 - link
I'd like at least the option of using a regular PCIe slot on these. I think with an HVR2250 and Win7 it would make for a nice LOW POWER alternative to a less flexible / subscription based DVR. I know there are/were some 945 chipset boards that had the slots, but they had problem playing back HighDef. So, also, I know, cablecard won't work, I don't need it...Well, I'm sure they'll introduce one sooner or later. It's not an emergency and there are alternatives, but they do use a bit more power from what I've read.