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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Badkarma - Wednesday, May 13, 2009 - link
Thanks Anand, will definitely drop you a note regarding this over the weekend. It's quite unfortunate that Zotac left out Wake-On-USB for their 9300/9400 mobos, something many consider essential in an HTPC build.djc208 - Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - link
If I didn't have so many projects already I'd seriously consider one of these as the basis of a CarPC system. It's not cheap but a good touchscreen car monitor will run you far more.NNix - Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - link
On page 5: "Once more, the Pentium 4 gets beat by the Atom 330 but loses to the Atom 230"I hope you will review Cortex A8-based Netbooks once they show up. Because Im not impressed at all with Atom, not when looking at <45W dualcore Athlons. Taking into account that those are at 65nm aswell the Atom aint looking that efficient.
nubie - Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - link
I would take a Celeron 420 any day of the week over an Atom or a dualcore athlon ;)GaryJohnson - Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - link
Celery is for eating, not computing.nubie - Wednesday, May 13, 2009 - link
"Celery is for eating, not computing."Sorry, let me be perfectly clear, I would like a Core2 Conroe-L from 1.6-2.0 ghz (every one I have used will easily go over 3 ghz with no voltage increase)
Look at the raw numbers between the Atom and the Conroe-L and tell me on a desktop/stationary machine (IE not a netbook) you wouldn't rather have something more than twice as powerful.
I realize it is called a "celeron", but it is the most freaking powerful (Core2 architecture) Celeron ever sold.
They cost $25-35 on ebay, the LGA 775 version of this board is only $139. It makes a whole lot of sense if you don't plan on running it on battery power.
Not to mention you can move all the way up to a Quad if you want, but a $60 e5200 2.5ghz 2MB Level 2 Cache seems like a perfect match.
Oh, and you get a PCI-e 2.0 X16 slot :P http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...">http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
For $10 more it makes a whole lot of sense. (If you already have the LGA 775 chip laying around it makes even more sense.)
npp - Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - link
What could have made this board perfect is a PCI-E slot to stick some decent audio in. Anyone seen mini PCI-E sound cards around :)Visual - Wednesday, May 13, 2009 - link
Why would you want a sound card for any computer made in the last 10 years? Even with the fanciest card, there would not be even one bit of difference on the digital outputs, which are the ones you should be connecting to your receiver. On the analog outputs there will be quality differences indeed, but if you're using them you deserve what you get :p Besides, I get the feeling you wouldn't notice the difference anyway as if you're that stupid to be using them you are also probably using some crappy speakers.flipmode - Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - link
"Everyone seemed to want a Ion based motherboard after I first previewed the platform."Yeah, it is all because of you :roll:
Is that x264 encoding that you used to test power consumption? Why that? The most power draw likely comes from the chipset. Test Blu-Ray playback or something.
Pandamonium - Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - link
The first comment was pretty rude and uncalled for, I must say.I wanted to see an Ion-based HTPC after the preview and this article confirmed that an Ion-based HTPC is what I should set my sights on next. The only improvement Zotac could have made is to include a PCIe slot for TV tuners, audio, or beefed up video. A higher rated Atom would be nice too, but I don't even know that one exists.