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
3dsmax 9 - SPECapc 3dsmax CPU Rendering Test
Today's desktop processors are more than fast enough to do professional level 3D rendering at home. To look at performance under 3dsmax we ran the SPECapc 3dsmax 8 benchmark (only the CPU rendering tests) under 3dsmax 9 SP1. The results reported are the rendering composite scores:
Once again the Atom 330 is able to equal the performance of the Celeron 420 in our 3dsmax test thanks to its multi-threaded nature and the Atom 330's ability to work on four threads at once. Ion isn't any faster than a conventional Atom platform in this case either.
Blender 2.48a
Blender is an open source 3D modeling application. Our benchmark here simply times how long it takes to render a character that comes with the application.
Blender gains an advantage on Ion thanks to its faster GPU (Blender seems to be impacted by GPU as well as CPU speed). The advantage amounts to 7.5% but it's there nonetheless.
Cinebench R10
Created by the Cinema 4D folks we have Cinebench, a popular 3D rendering benchmark that gives us both single and multi-threaded 3D rendering results.
Our Cinebench results sum up the Atom vs. Celeron debate pretty well. When working on a single thread, the Celeron is significantly faster; in this case over 2x the speed of the Atom processor. Throw more threads at the CPUs and the Atom's threading advantage works in its favor, the 330 can deliver performance greater than a Celeron 420.
POV-Ray 3.73 beta 23 Ray Tracing Performance
POV-Ray is a popular, open-source raytracing application that also doubles as a great tool to measure CPU floating point performance.
I ran the SMP benchmark in beta 23 of POV-Ray 3.73. The numbers reported are the final score in pixels per second.
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Pirks - Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - link
Jeebus, you'd prefer PCI-e x16 and Wi-Fi with uberslow CPU like Atom? If you check newegg you'll find a bunch of AM2 mini-ATX mobos better that this slow Intel p.o.s.Say this one http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...">http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8... has Wi-Fi and desktop DDR you love so much.
Ah, whatever, if you love uberslow CPUs so be it. I'll never get it why people buy Atom p.o.s. for desktops when there are so many excellent and cheap AM2 solutions around.
strikeback03 - Wednesday, May 13, 2009 - link
Notice he said LGA board, look at the last image on the last page. Not referring to the Atom board that was the subject of most of the article.kalrith - Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - link
I'm curious as to why this is in the video-card section and not in the motherboard sectionZingam - Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - link
PMU Versoin - don't these guys ever read what they type? And if that's a final version - I don't want to touch it. If there are mistakes like that I don't want to image what other bugs could they have implanted into it.DigitalFreak - Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - link
They must have the DailyTech guys proofread for them.AmdInside - Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - link
Just curious how well the motherboard w/ dual core ATOM would do with MAME? I am tempted to build a new HTPC on this but it must also play my MAME games smoothly.vajm1234 - Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - link
in b/w the winrar and WOW charts ""Once more, the Pentium 4 gets beat by the Atom 330 but loses to the Atom 230."" :PKidneyBean - Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - link
I hear that sometimes when you make a computer without any moving parts (using a flash drive) that sometimes a component will emit electrical buzzing noises. Did you hear anything like that?I may use this as a desktop computer.
KidneyBean - Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - link
Never mind, I wouldn't use this as a desktop computer. For me, any power savings would be cancelled by the slow performance.KidneyBean - Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - link
I like how you provided a comparison to the Pentium 4. I'm often upgrading people from older computers to newer ones and it's nice to be able to tell them how much faster the newer ones are. People who still have a high speed Pentium 4, and don't do gaming, are about at the point of needing to upgrade. Good job!