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The DIY Zotac Ion Motherboard Kit

By Vincent Chang - 12 May 2009

Test Setup & HD Video Playback

Test Setup

Previously, we had also tested Intel's standard 945GC chipset with a dual-core Atom. Hence, we'll be comparing the Zotac Ion with this Intel D945GCLF2 kit (motherboard and processor), along with the other two Ion systems we had tested before, the Acer AspireRevo and NVIDIA's own engineering prototype.

Take note that due to the fact that most of these were closed systems, the system configurations differed in ways that were beyond our control. For the Zotac Ion, we finally had more freedom to configure it and hence, we have mostly replicated the configuration of the Acer AspireRevo, with the key difference being a dual-core Atom instead of the single core. Therefore, we expect the scores on the Zotac Ion to reflect this.

How the Zotac Ion Stands
Specifications/ System Zotac Ion Motherboard Acer AspireRevo NVIDIA Ion Intel D945GCLF2
Processor Intel Atom 330 (1.6GHz) with 1MB L2 cache Intel Atom 230 (1.6GHz) with 512KB of L2 cache Intel Atom 330 (1.6GHz) with 1MB L2 cache running a single core Intel Atom 330 (1.6GHz) with 1MB L2 cache
Chipset NVIDIA Ion NVIDIA Ion NVIDIA Ion Intel 945GC
Memory 2GB DDR2 2GB DDR2 2GB DDR3 1GB DDR2
Video NVIDIA Ion (256MB) NVIDIA Ion (256MB) NVIDIA Ion (256MB) Intel GMA950 (128MB)
HDD Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 SATA Hitachi 5400RPM SATA Seagate Momentus 7200.2 SATA Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 SATA

Benchmarks

Using Windows Vista Home Premium with Service Pack 1 across the board, we set out to test the following benchmarks. The new Zotac Ion board was tested using the latest NVIDIA ForceWare 185.55 graphics drivers, which are quite similar to those used on the Acer AspireRevo machine.

  • PCMark05 (ver. 120)
  • PCMark Vantage
  • 3DMark06 (ver. 110)
  • Unreal Tournament 3 (version 1.1)
  • CyberLink PowerDVD 8.0 and 9.0 (for Blu-ray playback testing)
  • Windows Media Classic Homecinema (for HD video playback)

Blu-ray Playback

For the Zotac Ion and the AspireRevo, we plugged in our own external Blu-ray drive for this test. Comparison numbers from previously tested desktop IGP platforms (an ASUS GeForce 9300 mGPU board and an Intel G45 chipset board) running on a Core 2 Duo processor were used as reference. Note also that the Acer AspireRevo was tested with CyberLink 9.0 for Blu-ray playback which came with the system. Since we only had version 8.0, we ran the Zotac Ion with this older version - which was what the earlier test setups like the ASUS and Intel reference boards used as well.

Compared to the Acer AspireRevo, the dual-core Zotac Ion performed significantly better. It was not at the level of the Core 2 Duo powered ASUS GeForce 9300 mGPU board, but in this case, it has surpassed the Intel G45 board in terms of CPU utilization rate (the lower the better of course).

Following up on our attempt to play HD video clips (1080p quality) using Windows Media Classic Homecinema during our testing of the Acer AspireRevo where we found the software unable to take full advantage of the integrated GPU in certain occasions, we conducted a similar test on the Zotac Ion. This time round, we had no issues after configuring the Windows Media Classic to use EVR Custom, which basically meant that the NVIDIA Ion was taking up the workload.

The result was smooth, flawless video playback, with CPU utilization consistently below 10%. As we had mentioned before, getting the application to work as intended is crucial for the Ion platform and in this case, it worked perfectly. For the enthusiast, this could involve tweaking the internal filters and playback options in the software, something that you can find here (warning: large image files) among various online tutorials.

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