NVIDIA's Ion 'Cannon' Lock and Loaded!

Results - PCMark05 & 3DMark06

Results - PCMark05 & 3DMark06

We started off with two well-known synthetic benchmarks, PCMark05 and 3DMark06 and the NVIDIA Ion quickly showed its worth with its higher overall system score when compared to a typical Atom system in the form of the Gigabyte M912. Of course, there was no matching the other two desktop chipsets here, even for the Ion.

If we look only at the graphics portion, the Ion was not that far behind the Intel G45 chipset in PCMark05. And when it came to 3DMark06, the Ion actually did extremely well, beating the Intel board with a far more powerful processor into third place. Remember, 3DMark06 overall scores factor in the processor's competency as well. Thus the results are definitely a sign that the integrated GPU on the Ion was pulling its weight, especially when it came to graphics performance. Bear in mind too that the desktop boards were on Windows XP compared to the Ion and the Gigabyte M912 on Vista, but this shouldn't vary scores much.