Two New Ions: ASUS AT3N7A-I and ASRock Ion 330
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 28, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
The Temperature and Noise Showdown
Under load (playing Quantum of Solace, full screen) the temperatures between the systems varied by a large margin. As expected, the Zotac board with a fan was the coolest. The ASRock in its silent mode ran the hottest and the ASUS with its noisy fan was a bit warmer than the Zotac.
The Zotac fan is optional although removing it sent temperatures up above 70C. While the system never crashed or dropped frames without a fan directly on the heatsink, I would recommend having a case fan moving air over the heatsink to preserve the system’s lifespan.
I measured sound 7” above the motherboards. Without any fan, ambient noise in the room gave us a floor of 41 dBA. The quietest solution was the ASRock at 43.5 dB, followed by the Zotac at 44 dB and finally the ASUS at just over 50 dB. While the ASRock system was technically quieter than the Zotac, the noise it did emit was more noticeable. The rear case fan in the ASRock Ion had a repeating drone to it, whereas the Zotac fan just sounded like it was moving air. Honestly, I’d say Zotac wins it here.
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cghebert - Friday, August 28, 2009 - link
Anand,While SSDs obviously offer a speed increase, you can't store that many movies on them. And, if you have a small ITX case, there might not be room for two drives. Are the ION systems fast enough to play HD movies over ethernet, or would the two drives need to be in the same case?
Thanks for the review btw!
GeorgeH - Friday, August 28, 2009 - link
Right now you can get Zotac's LGA775 Mini-ITX GF9300 for 119 AR. Couple that with a $50 E1500, and you've got a $169 system that will destroy these ION platforms for the exact same price. Similar options exist on the AMD side as well (think GF8200 + X2 240 Regor for ~$160.)Given that those options exist, a comparison with Atom would be awesome, especially one covering noise, power consumption, and case choices - i.e. could you build an LGA775 Mini-ITX in a similar form factor as the ASRock with comparable acoustics, or do you really need the ultra-low power consumption and TDP of an Atom CPU?
eversteegt - Tuesday, November 3, 2009 - link
Great, but are you sure the GF 9300 on that board has the same core with the same features (like playing Full HD 1080p video completely hardware-accelerated in Linux) as the GF9300 core on the ION platform? ;)Pandamonium - Friday, August 28, 2009 - link
That Zotac board doesn't support wake on USB quite yet, as far as I can tell. That's a pretty huge deal breaker for HTPC duty.Personally, I want something only powerful enough to handle streaming HD. If Adobe/nVidia get their act together and offload Flash scaling to the GPU, the Atom gets my vote for the reduced TDP. For a system that will be sitting in an enclosed TV stand (glass door style), a low TDP is absolutely necessary.
GeorgeH - Saturday, August 29, 2009 - link
If the Zotac board doesn't work for you, you can pick up an Intel G45 board for ~$5-10 less. As to the TDP, the idle power of a 5050e/780G system can be as low as 35-40W, or about the same as the Asus ION board - which leads me to believe that they're also producing comparable amounts of heat at idle or when doing IGP accelerated video playback.Obviously the 5050e is going to be more efficient than the examples I listed (which I couldn't find reputable and relevant numbers for) and will consume much more power than the Atom under full CPU load, but that's not the point. The point is that I'm not quite convinced that ION is necessary or even the best option unless you're going with ultra-slim designs such as the Aspire Revo.
cghebert - Friday, August 28, 2009 - link
That's an excellent point. I actually just built a micro-ATX Athlon X2+Radeon 4550 based system as my HTPC because I wanted a system that could play Hulu and other streaming internet videos, something that the ION would limit.Plus, one beef I have about most ITX cases (at least that don't come with a DC adapter for their power supply) is that they are TALL. Taller than a nice micro-ATX case, which fits much better amongst my HT gear.
One case that I didn't look at that is worth mention for the ION is this one http://www.mini-box.com/M350-universal-mini-itx-en...">http://www.mini-box.com/M350-universal-mini-itx-en...
from the same people that make the PICO psu.
I'd also like to see a comparison between ION systems and low power ITX systems built with Intel or AMD desktop chips.
TA152H - Friday, August 28, 2009 - link
Intel did a nice job with the processor, but we're stuck with either getting the miserable 945, or buying something from a crap company (NVIDIA) that is at least somewhat modern.What a terrible choice. I'd love to own an Atom based file server, but what kind of choice is this? I'm not stupid enough to buy NVIDIA, but then, what kind of choice is the grotesquely obsolete 945 chipset?
It has taken Intel far too long to come out with a reasonable solution to this problem. You could overlook it for a few months, or even half a year, but it's gone on far too long. It's a pity ATI didn't enter this market. You'd have nice performance, and it wouldn't be so frightening to buy a product from them.
Anand, why put the Pentium 4 in the power tests? They kind of came out of nowhere, and, actually used less power than I thought they would. You really seem to have a weird fascination with the Netburst processors; probably because they were so bad, they are interesting. I will say this though, if they had been built on 45nm, with the much better power characteristics of this process, they'd probably hit 6 GHz in their sleep. Meaning, they'd perform roughly like the 2.0 GHz Core 2 :-P.
eversteegt - Tuesday, November 3, 2009 - link
Why this "steep" comment about NVIDIA being crap?For Linux users (like me), NVIDIA is the ONLY quality option to play back hardware-accelerated video. AMD does not even get close to build stable graphics drivers for Linux, let alone hardware-accelerated HD video. I think NVIDIA ION is the only platforum that gives the Atom a right to exist....
strikeback03 - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
Intel does have a more modern chipset for Atom (the US15) but almost no one is using it. Whether this is due to cost or another stupid Intel limitation I do not know.bh192012 - Friday, August 28, 2009 - link
What was WOW like after you OC CPU and GPU? Also, if someone someday decided to actually cool these things with something bigger than a 40mm fan, can you hit 2.2 ghz etc.