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 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.
| Motherboard: | Intel DX48BT2 (Intel X48) MSI DKA790GX Platinum (AMD 790GX) |
| Chipset: | Intel X48 AMD 790GX |
| Chipset Drivers: | Intel 9.1.1.1010 (Intel) AMD Catalyst 8.12 |
| Hard Disk: | Intel X25-M SSD (80GB) |
| Memory: | G.Skill DDR2-800 2 x 2GB (4-4-4-12) G.Skill DDR2-1066 2 x 2GB (5-5-5-15) Qimonda DDR3-1066 4 x 1GB (7-7-7-20) |
| Video Card: | eVGA GeForce GTX 280 |
| Video Drivers: | NVIDIA ForceWare 180.43 (Vista64) NVIDIA ForceWare 178.24 (Vista32)
NVIDIA ForceWare 185.85 (Ion)
|
| Desktop Resolution: | 1920 x 1200 |
| OS: | Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit (for SYSMark) Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit |
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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