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Page 1 of 2   Intel Atom CPUs, for a long time, were combined only with Intel 945C chipset and integrated GMA950 graphics card. Although Intel graphics card is worthless when it comes to games, it is power enough to play HD videos. In addition, this combination has low power consumption levels, so besides HTPCs, it was ideal for office configurations. After lot of troubles, NVIDIA presented its ION platform with support for Intel CPUs. Whole platform is based on Intel Atom CPU, but chipset and graphics card are different, so besides hardware support for HD video reproduction there is also support for DirectX 10. All movie lovers will appreciate this fact, while these features will most certainly be one of the most important features that will promote ION as perfect base for HTPCs. When it comes to power consumption, this new platform should have slightly higher consumption compared to Intel solution.
As expected, first motherboard based on NVIDIA ION platform came from ASUS. Rather small box came into our test lab with mini ITX motherboard inside, which means that its dimensions are just 17.7x17.1cm (standard CD box, for example, is 14x14cm). Despite its dimensions, this motherboard is packed with components, so there are 10 USB ports, 3 SATA ports, HDMI, VGA etc. There are no COM, LPT, PATA and floppy disk drive connector, which are good news and a reason why there is a lot of other connectors, but at the same time these are bad news for owners of older printers, scanners or older PATA HDDs. In the box we also found 2 SATA cables, manual, backpanel, discs with drivers and other software.
Considering its size, layout of this motherboard is good. Big blue cooler with small fan dominates whole motherboard. There is one PCI slot available for future upgrades (TV tuner or sound card), but there is no PCIe slot, so graphics subsystem cannot be upgraded. There is also gigabit LAN, which is good news since most other micro and mini ATX motherboards have only 10/100 megabit Ethernet adapter.
The hearth of the system consists of Intel Atom N330 CPU that operates at 1.6GHz and has two cores. Support for Hyper Threading is present so OS will recognize this CPU as quad core. Integrated graphics card is NVIDIA 9300 and supports DirectX 10 and HD video reproduction. Since this GPU supports NVIDIA CUDA and PhysX technologies, hardware accelerated video transcoding is possible, along with usage of both of these technologies in games. In BIOS can be set how much memory will be allocated to graphics card. BIOS also offers option of GPU core and shaders overclocking, which can result in slightly higher fps in some games.
For testing purposes, we made a configuration based on ASUS AT3N7A-I and HDD WD1600AAJS, optical drive, 2 x 1GB DDR memory at 800MHz and CL5. These components were used so we can get the best perspective on performances and power consumption. During testing period configuration didn’t reach higher temperatures which means that 4cm fan mounted on blue heat spreader did its job perfectly. It became clear that fan could have worked on lower RPM than 6200 and achieve lower noise levels, but in case this motherboard was placed in a smaller HTPC chassis (with lower airflow) those 6200RPM would get handy. No instability was experienced. Performance levels reached expected values, with only exception being memory transfers that for some reason, underperformed.
Gaming on this platform is possible but in lower resolutions. Of course, you can forget about new games, but fps in games that can be played is much higher than on Intel GMA. Unfortunately, more powerful graphics card also resulted in higher power consumption levels compared to Intel solution, but still much lover compared to full desktop solutions. Since there is hardware acceleration for HD video, this platform can play 1080p video without any problems, which is not the case with Intel solution. This is major advantage of this platform.
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