Benchmarks and Conclusion of Zotac ION with Atom N330
Bluetooth 9 Jun 2009

Benchmarks

We ran some basic benchmarks on the machine. This is because most of the benchmarks of today won't even run correctly on this processor.  We ran Super PI, Sisoft Sandra XII, HD Tach etc. Here are the results.

System Configuration:

• Zotac ION

• Intel ATOM 1.6GHz N330

• 2GB Kingston DDR2-1066

• Hitachi Deskstar SATAII HDD
   

As we tested the board using MS Vista, the results can't be directly used for comparison with a system running Windows XP. Nevertheless, we can use it as a reference and see if the board performs on par with the 2 atom notebooks we tested before.

The memory bandwidth is also improved over the traditional 945GC design. This is because it uses a dual channel memory architecture and supports up to DDR2-800. The Dhrystone and Whetstone results almost doubled that of the single core Atom. That is the same for Multimedia tests as well.

As we used an external HDD, we can see that the average read HDD performance is also way better than the SSD or the HDD in MSI wind U100. For application that requires random reads, this may not have an advantage, but for those applications that do a lot of read/write to HDD sequentially for big files, HDD still has an edge over SSD.

As the Zotac Ion 330 uses the NVIDIA ION, it supports dual channel memory. We threw in 2GB of DDR2-1066 but it was configured to run at DDR2-800 C5-5-5-15,2T. The other systems were running SPD timings. For the ECS 945GCT-D, it was running at CAS 4-4-4-16,2T at DDR2-533.

The integrated graphics core in the Zotac ION 330 outperformed the 945GC by almost is able to do better than the integrated graphics of the Intel 945GC. It scored 1380 in 3Dmark06 and P379 in 3DMark Vantage Performance test.  On an Intel 945GC, it only scored 90 points.

We threw a bluray title to it and powerdvd is showing a low cpu utilisation of only 10-15% as compared to 75-80% on the ECS Atom 945GC board.

As the board supports CUDA, we tried an application PowerDirector 7 and we noticed significant improvements in speed.

Conclusion

The ZOTAC ION 330 is definitely something that HTPC users would look forward for building their own HTPCs. As it uses a proprietary powre supply unit, it might be costly to find and replace a faulty unit after warranty expires.  Another thing is that the board would have been made better if it provided a power LED so that we know it is in the ON state.

The low noise and WiFi N also makes it a wireless station for your multimedia needs playing back H.264 clips at super low CPU utilisation. Good bye to laggy system as the dual core is able to handle it.

Pros

• small footprint

• HDMI (HDCP)

Cons

• no debug led

• no pcie slots

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