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
Gaming Performance
The gaming performance of Intel’s basic Atom platform is a joke. I’ll put aside debates of whether or not you would want to game on an Atom for a moment. World of Warcraft does a great job of straddling the line between casual and hardcore gaming and thus makes a good candidate for looking at gaming performance of Ion vs. Intel’s standard Atom platform.
I tested by running through a small outdoor section at 800 x 600 (24-bit color, no AA) using WoW’s built in “Good” visual quality settings. This is the same chart from the Pentium 4 section but I'm repeating it here so you have something to look at while we discuss the gaming potential of Ion:
The Ion platform managed just under 18 fps, which wasn’t incredibly smooth to play on but it was close. If I dropped the settings even lower I could easily get a smooth experience. The Intel D945GCLF2 managed a whopping 3 fps. I didn’t even bother benchmarking the single core version; I’m not that fond of single digits.
Most modern FPS games will show worse performance than what we just saw under WoW. Far Cry 2 and Crysis Warhead will give you under 7 fps for Zotac’s Ion platform, but other, more mainstream titles will perform similarly if not better.
I still maintain that the Atom CPU is not fast enough for a good gaming experience on far too many modern titles, but to NVIDIA’s credit, the Ion platform does make it fast enough in games that it otherwise wouldn’t be.
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ahmshaegar - Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - link
Greater power consumption = more heat. Where's that energy going to go?marshylucas - Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - link
You were faster, I was about to reply something similar.Thumbs up for the fanless design!
Jeffk464 - Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - link
Yes, but my laptop is very quiet, even with being severely limited on space for a heat sink and fan. If you had more rooms to put a large heat sink on it with a large low rpm fan, I think it would be near silent.trabpukcip - Friday, May 15, 2009 - link
A laptop does not make the best HTPC though. Connectivity is too limited and is generally inconvenient.GeorgeH - Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - link
"a single Gigabit Ethernet port (just like on the Intel boards)"Actually, only the D945GCLF2 has Gigabit Ethernet. The D945GCLF is stuck with 10/100, which is kind of a deal killer for me.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - link
Thanks for the correction :)Take care,
Anand
DrLudvig - Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - link
I'm confused here, most places it says that the hole ION thing is a 9400 chip, while some other places, like now here, says 9300?What is it really?
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - link
The 9300 and 9400 are the same chip, the difference is GPU clock. Take a look at the table on this page:http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=3432">http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=3432
The GF9300 on the Zotac board actually runs a bit slower than the stock GeForce 9300. It runs its core at 450MHz and its shaders at 1.1GHz instead of 450/1.2.
Take care,
Anand
Badkarma - Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - link
Anand,Can you please confirm/deny if the Zotac Ion boards support wake-on-usb? The Zotac 9300 mini-itx board does not support wake-on-usb and therefore powering the system on from standby from the MCE remote does not work without physical workarounds.
Thanks.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - link
I'm out of the office right now but I'll try it this weekend :) Drop me an email to remind me if you don't see something by the end of next week :)Take care,
Anand