Zotac's Ion-Based Mini-ITX Board For Atom Debuts 106
MojoKid writes "There have been a handful of NVIDIA Ion-based products with Intel's Atom processor that have been unveiled recently, ranging from NVIDIA's own reference system, to the
Acer Aspire Revo SFF PC. Today Zotac announced an Ion motherboard that will be appealing to the DIY crowd. The design of this
IONITX-A model board tested and reviewed here in particular, offers some very interesting features, not the least of which is its DC power input with an external power brick. It also is
built on Intel's dual core Atom process for a bit more horsepower to back up NVIDIA's Ion integrated graphics chip."
In a word: awesome! (Score:3, Interesting)
There's been talk about NVIDIA's Ion since late last year when news first broke of the ultra small form factor platform. At the time, NVIDIA's tiny Atom-powered prototype system wasn't even called Ion yet, but images of the minuscule motherboard that would eventually be used in the reference platform had already surfaced and the community was buzzing with interest. One of the major concerns with most netbooks and nettops was their relatively weak integrated graphics solutions, and Ion would potentially address that concern.
Around the time when Ion was first announced, there was some scuttlebutt that Intel "disapproved" of the platform and that the company wouldn't sell OEMs Atom processors separately, without pairing them to an accompanying Intel chipset. Those rumors were soon squashed, however, because Intel does in fact sell Atom processors independent of a chipset. Although, I think it's still pretty safe to say Intel isn't exactly thrilled with Ion's existence. Regardless of what anyone thinks of Ion though, the platform is moving closer to public availability. I actually took a look at NVIDIA's Ion reference system a couple of months back and in I stated that "I want one - preferably sooner than later".
Well, the wait is almost over...!
=smudge=
Yeah, still awaiting ARM (Score:5, Interesting)
FINALLY! (Score:3, Interesting)
This is what should have happened in the first place.
I have an Intel m-ITX board with the 330, it's nice... I wish it had a PCI-E/16 instead of regular PCI,,,
Could only find an ATI 2400/PCI for it, now that they're out, I might rebuild with a Nvidia 95(6?)00 because ubuntu won't install (complains about memory corruption errors. The. memory. is. OK.).
Intel's graphics are so bad they're criminal.
And please... stop making 230's and just make 330's.
I just hope it's not too expensive,
With a separate power brick made-to-go with this board,,,
A few stand-offs and you can have a nice low-power-draw render cluster.
It'd be even nicer if blender, yafaray, or lux had a branch that took advantage of CUDA as well.
WOW Netbook please. (Score:5, Interesting)
1) Build Netbook that is a) cheap, b) long battery life, and c) ability to play WOW at minimal settings.
2) ???
3) PROFIT!
Seriously though. That is what I want. You build it and I will go buy it.
Likely it will need at least a 10" screen to display without eyes bleeding.
From what I have read the Atom 1.6 just doesn't have the guts to run WOW realistically even at minimal levels.
However WOW is not a game that requires a lot of power to begin with (other than disk space). If it can play WOW it can probably play all my outdated games as well.
a 10" screen, a long battery life, some basic office software, wireless, wow, and decent price.
Doesn't have to be windows based. Linux is fine. You just have to make sure it becomes popular, and a community will help maintain it and provide updates and support. Make a cheap WOW playing netbook, and it WILL be popular.
Anyway that's my 2 cents.
Re:Limited application? (Score:1, Interesting)
Its main use will be for HTPC. Small, low power and quiet operation while delivering GPU accelerated 1080P content! Not to mention, relatively cheap.
It's going to be an interesting summer with all these ION based mobos and nettops coming out. Love to get a 330 based Acer Revo with an SSD drive (or no HD at all and boot from a 4gb usb stick) and run linux + XBMC.
My only issues with that Zotac combo is that it's too fully featured for me. Once there's some competition, prices should come down as well. You can buy intel 945g micro-atx boards + atom 330 + 2gb ram combos for ~ $80. Right now, there's a pretty high premium for jumping to the ION platform.
Yes, but XBMC Linux? (Score:2, Interesting)
The biggest question for me, though, is how well does XBMC with VDPAU run with this?
Re:Yeah, still awaiting ARM (Score:4, Interesting)
I agree but they need to build it using the Tegra.
They will also need Flash that uses the GPU for playback.
I feel there is one other part that is missing that they will need.
I for one see Netbooks being more like the iPhone/iPod Touch then the traditional PC. Linux needs and App store. I feel that Developers need a way to make money. I know that a lot of FOSS purists will get bent but some way for developers to sell their software would do Linux a world of good.
Before anyone bothers yes the iTunes Appstore has a lot of crappy software as well as the good. So does any Liunx distro repository you would care to mention.
Yes Flash is closed but everybody still uses it. Get a GPU accelerated Theora on netbooks as well as Flash and you will get more people using that.
You get a netbook with a good App store going and yes people will use it.
Honestly that is why I am betting that the first ARM netbooks will be running Android.
Re:Yeah, still awaiting ARM (Score:4, Interesting)
Except that a repository doesn't offer a way to sell software.
I see that as the key. Just like the AppStore you should have a mix of free and for none free software.
Just like with the IPhone if you gave people a way to make money off their software I think you would see a lot of good software available.
That and allow people to rate which program is better like the App store.
For instance do you know which DVD authoring program for Linux is better?
Or which CAD system.
Or which Twitter app?
An App store would give developers and the distro a revenue stream that they could use to improve there software.
Plus if you don't like paying for software keep using the free stuff and let those that are want to pay help pay for the development of the Distro.
The Sound of Silence (Score:2, Interesting)
Just in case anyone is checking, the total power consumption of this puppy is shown as 38 Watts, just a hair above the heat pipe rating for this Coolermaster heat-pipe based case [coolermaster.com]
Who wants to build the first one?
Almost good for NAS... (Score:3, Interesting)
I keep seeing new boards like this come out, hoping one will have all the features I want for an ideal NAS (network attached storage) build. Right now, there is always some trade-off for what I want. Show me the board that has...
One board comes close: the VIA NAS 7800 [logicsupply.com], but it doesn't appear to be available to the general public. And I don't see anything about supporting ECC memory. For no reason other than hearsay, I'm not so sure I'd trust important data to a Via chipset.
The next best, IMO (and I actually have one of these), is the Gigabyte GA-MA74GM-S2 [newegg.com]. Check out SilentPCReview's writeup [silentpcreview.com] on this board. Only problem: I'm not sure if it supports ECC or not (AMD CPUs do, but I've heard it still requires the motherboard vendor to enable it). One annoying problem is that the PCIe x16 slot is for video only---you can't put a SATA controller card, extra NIC or anything else useful to a NAS in there. Still, while it's a very low-power board when paired with the right CPU, it's still overkill for a NAS. In general, I think the power draw for a NAS (excluding the hard drives) should be under 15 Watts.
The Point of View Ion/Atom [techpowerup.com] board linked above looks promising. But, as far as I can see, no compact flash, and probably no ECC memory support.
Hackintosh? (Score:3, Interesting)
I've been waiting for somebody to start pairing the dual core atom 330 with nvidia's geforce 9400m for a while. In my opinion, this is more than enough horsepower for the average end-user desktop, htpc, or netbook. And so power efficient too!
I'm seriously considering one of these zotac boards for an htpc, while using an even more power efficient arm netbook (e.g. always innovating touchbook) for my portable linux workstation. The zotac board would also likely serve as a good hackintosh, no?
Via could also potentially profit if they paired one of their up-and-coming dual-core chips with the geforce 9400m.