Comparative review of motherboards on the nVidia ION platform
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In the comments to the previous topic, many business people compared the motherboard from ASUS with similar products from other manufacturers. This prompted me to publish this comparative review, which will cover in detail the boards announced on the nVidia ION platform that were announced and already went on sale. In order to add objectivity, the Intel D945GCLF2 board will dilute this ION-family.
This diagram shows the technical capabilities of the platform. Of course, the mini-ITX form factor imposes significant restrictions on the layout of the boards and each manufacturer tries to give a touch of personality to its product. This is what allows us to compare these, in general, very similar boards.
List of boards under consideration:
Zotac has a whole line of boards on this platform. For consideration, I chose the most “charged” and simplest motherboard in the series. The main differences between them are Atom 330 vs Atom 230, a built-in power supply, Wi-Fi 802.11n with an external antenna, and a fan in the kit.
Of the expansion slots on the board, there is only miniPCI-E, which can be occupied by a Wi-Fi adapter (in the case of the A-series), an SD card reader or an adapter for PCI-E 1x. The most innovative solution in this series of boards, of course, is the built-in power supply, designed for 19 volts. This allows you not to go broke into specialized mini-ITX cases, but using improvised means to make it yourself.
The heatsink included in the kit copes quite well with cooling the processor and chipset. In the case of Intel Atom 230, when the processor is fully loaded with synthetic tests, the core temperature reaches 110 ° C, which is very close to 125 ° C declared in the specification. With Intel Atom 330 the situation is similar, adjusted for two cores. However, with such heating of the cores, the temperature of the radiator does not rise above 70 ° C. In normal mode, the system behaves even calmer.
Zotac was the first company to make a good bet on a fresh platform and introduce motherboards to the general public.
Now you can buy boards in Moscow at prices: $ 150 for the B-series and $ 250 for the A-series.
This motherboard was relatively detailed in the previous topic . For some reason, ASUS refused the D-Sub connector and left only HDMI. The highlight of the board is the built-in Bluetooth adapter, which is soldered next to the USB connectors and has a nice blue dummy.
According to gromka , the red USB connectors should support USB 3.0 technology, but I did not find a single mention of this in the board reviews. IMHO, they just have one plastic insert with an eSATA port.
The board has a full-fledged PCI-slot, which allows you to expand the functionality of the system as anyone There will get a TV tuner, and an additional network card, and even a RAID controller. Thus, based on the board, you can build not only HTPC, but also a router or a full NAS.
Since the board will go on sale only at the end of September, we need to talk about prices carefully. However, there are at least 3 stores on Ebay selling it for $ 155 . Apparently on pre-order.
Quite an interesting board from Point of View. As a cooling system for the Intel Atom 330 processor and chipset, different heatsinks are used. The chipset radiator, unlike the processor one, is also cooled with a fan, if necessary. It is unclear why such an opportunity was not left for the central processor ... Apparently, the engineers decided that the board would be used only as the basis for HTPC.
The RAM slots are implemented in the SO-DIMM format, which allowed to free up some space on the board for the PCI-Express 16x slot. There are also 4 SATA2 slots with declared support for RAID 1 and 0 on the board. It is strange, but other manufacturers did not declare RAID support in their boards. 7.1 sound, standard for ION boards, is replaced by 5.1.
Estimated retail price -200 $ .
Under the Pegatron brand, exactly the same board sells for $ 150 . I never thought that Point of View is such an expensive brand. =)
Case for small. It remains to consider a budget competitor for non-HTPC tasks, made by Intel. By the way, its price is much lower than the platform on ION, largely due to the inflated prices for Intel Atom processors, if you buy them without the 945gc chipset. On this occasion, nVidia even rolled a barrel on Intel.
Everything is a little simpler here. Intel's chipset does not support hardware video decoding, and does not allow the board to engage in a battle with the ION boards for its superiority as the basis for HTPC. Then other applications remain - gateways, NAS, low-power home servers. It is especially convenient to use this model as a thin diskless client using CompactFlash cards.
There is nothing special to boast of on the board - Gigabit network, PCI slot, two SATA2 connectors, one IDE and one DDR2 slot. The heatsinks on the chipset and the processor look rather weak, I can’t believe that they can cool the Intel Atom 330 normally. It’s like Intel’s top-end motherboard for this segment, the rest are equipped with Atom 230 processors. The
price in Moscow retail is $ 100 .
At the moment, these are all participants in our review. It's time to start the comparison.
A summary table of the characteristics of the boards under consideration.
Well and accordingly the tasks that can be solved with the help of these boards.
That's probably all. The above is my IMHO, and I hope that your comments will complement the review and make it more objective.
If you like the topic, the next series will be an overview of the mini-ITX format cases for various tasks.
upd: zar0ku1 shared an invite ... But something did not grow together with his invite. Invited Himself - Meet Inc
Introduction
In the comments to the previous topic, many business people compared the motherboard from ASUS with similar products from other manufacturers. This prompted me to publish this comparative review, which will cover in detail the boards announced on the nVidia ION platform that were announced and already went on sale. In order to add objectivity, the Intel D945GCLF2 board will dilute this ION-family.
This diagram shows the technical capabilities of the platform. Of course, the mini-ITX form factor imposes significant restrictions on the layout of the boards and each manufacturer tries to give a touch of personality to its product. This is what allows us to compare these, in general, very similar boards.
Overview
List of boards under consideration:
- ZOTAC ION ITX A Series
- ZOTAC ION ITX B Series
- ASUS AT3N7A-I
- Point of View ION330 - aka Pegatron IPX7A-ION
- Intel D945GCLF2
1-2. ZOTAC ION ITX A Series and ZOTAC ION ITX B Series
Zotac has a whole line of boards on this platform. For consideration, I chose the most “charged” and simplest motherboard in the series. The main differences between them are Atom 330 vs Atom 230, a built-in power supply, Wi-Fi 802.11n with an external antenna, and a fan in the kit.
Of the expansion slots on the board, there is only miniPCI-E, which can be occupied by a Wi-Fi adapter (in the case of the A-series), an SD card reader or an adapter for PCI-E 1x. The most innovative solution in this series of boards, of course, is the built-in power supply, designed for 19 volts. This allows you not to go broke into specialized mini-ITX cases, but using improvised means to make it yourself.
The heatsink included in the kit copes quite well with cooling the processor and chipset. In the case of Intel Atom 230, when the processor is fully loaded with synthetic tests, the core temperature reaches 110 ° C, which is very close to 125 ° C declared in the specification. With Intel Atom 330 the situation is similar, adjusted for two cores. However, with such heating of the cores, the temperature of the radiator does not rise above 70 ° C. In normal mode, the system behaves even calmer.
Zotac was the first company to make a good bet on a fresh platform and introduce motherboards to the general public.
Now you can buy boards in Moscow at prices: $ 150 for the B-series and $ 250 for the A-series.
3. ASUS AT3N7A-I
This motherboard was relatively detailed in the previous topic . For some reason, ASUS refused the D-Sub connector and left only HDMI. The highlight of the board is the built-in Bluetooth adapter, which is soldered next to the USB connectors and has a nice blue dummy.
According to gromka , the red USB connectors should support USB 3.0 technology, but I did not find a single mention of this in the board reviews. IMHO, they just have one plastic insert with an eSATA port.
The board has a full-fledged PCI-slot, which allows you to expand the functionality of the system as anyone There will get a TV tuner, and an additional network card, and even a RAID controller. Thus, based on the board, you can build not only HTPC, but also a router or a full NAS.
Since the board will go on sale only at the end of September, we need to talk about prices carefully. However, there are at least 3 stores on Ebay selling it for $ 155 . Apparently on pre-order.
4. Point of View ION330
Quite an interesting board from Point of View. As a cooling system for the Intel Atom 330 processor and chipset, different heatsinks are used. The chipset radiator, unlike the processor one, is also cooled with a fan, if necessary. It is unclear why such an opportunity was not left for the central processor ... Apparently, the engineers decided that the board would be used only as the basis for HTPC.
The RAM slots are implemented in the SO-DIMM format, which allowed to free up some space on the board for the PCI-Express 16x slot. There are also 4 SATA2 slots with declared support for RAID 1 and 0 on the board. It is strange, but other manufacturers did not declare RAID support in their boards. 7.1 sound, standard for ION boards, is replaced by 5.1.
Estimated retail price -200 $ .
Under the Pegatron brand, exactly the same board sells for $ 150 . I never thought that Point of View is such an expensive brand. =)
5. Intel D945GCLF2
Case for small. It remains to consider a budget competitor for non-HTPC tasks, made by Intel. By the way, its price is much lower than the platform on ION, largely due to the inflated prices for Intel Atom processors, if you buy them without the 945gc chipset. On this occasion, nVidia even rolled a barrel on Intel.
Everything is a little simpler here. Intel's chipset does not support hardware video decoding, and does not allow the board to engage in a battle with the ION boards for its superiority as the basis for HTPC. Then other applications remain - gateways, NAS, low-power home servers. It is especially convenient to use this model as a thin diskless client using CompactFlash cards.
There is nothing special to boast of on the board - Gigabit network, PCI slot, two SATA2 connectors, one IDE and one DDR2 slot. The heatsinks on the chipset and the processor look rather weak, I can’t believe that they can cool the Intel Atom 330 normally. It’s like Intel’s top-end motherboard for this segment, the rest are equipped with Atom 230 processors. The
price in Moscow retail is $ 100 .
At the moment, these are all participants in our review. It's time to start the comparison.
Feature Comparison
A summary table of the characteristics of the boards under consideration.
| Features \ Boards |  ZOTAC ION ITX A |  ZOTAC ION ITX B |  ASUS AT3N7A-I |  PoV ION330 |  Intel D945GCLF2 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | 250 $ | 150 $ | 150 $ | 150-200 $ | $ 100 |
| CPU | Intel Atom 330 | Intel Atom 230 | Intel Atom 330 | Intel Atom 330 | Intel Atom 330 |
| Oper. memory | 2x DDR2-800 | 2x DDR2-800 | 2x DDR2-800 | 2x DDR2-800 SO-DIMM | 1x DDR2-667 |
| Video connectors | HDMI, D-Sub, DVI-D | HDMI, D-Sub, DVI-D | HDMI, D-Sub | HDMI, D-Sub, DVI-D | D-sub |
| USB | 6x USB 2.0 | 6x USB 2.0 | 8x USB 2.0 | 4x USB 2.0 | 4x + 4x USB 2.0 |
| Network | Gigabit ethernet | ||||
| SATA, IDE | 3x SATA2 | 3x SATA2 | 3x SATA2 | 4x SATA2 RAID 1.0 | 2x SATA2 without ACHI, 1x IDE |
| Expansion Slots | miniPCI-E | miniPCI-E | PCI | PCI-E 16x | PCI |
| Additionally | Wi-fi 802.11n, built-in PSU, | passive cooling | Bluetooth, USB 3.0 (?) | passive cooling, 5.1 sound | sound 5.1 |
Well and accordingly the tasks that can be solved with the help of these boards.
| Features \ Boards | ZOTAC ION ITX A | ZOTAC ION ITX B | ASUS AT3N7A-I | PoV ION330 | Intel D945GCLF2 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| HTPC | + | + | + | + | - |
| Wireless HTPC | + | ± | ± | ± | - |
| Home gateway | - | - | + | + | + |
| Silent system | + | + | + | + | + |
| NAS | - | - | + | + | + |
| Diskless station | ± | + | - | - | + |
That's probably all. The above is my IMHO, and I hope that your comments will complement the review and make it more objective.
If you like the topic, the next series will be an overview of the mini-ITX format cases for various tasks.
upd: zar0ku1 shared an invite ... But something did not grow together with his invite. Invited Himself - Meet Inc