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Review of Zotac ION Intel ATOM 1.6GHz processor with NVIDIA ION chipset
Bluetooth 8 Jun 2009

Custom designed Atom Board based on NVIDIA ION the Zotac ION

NetPCs seem to be the next wave that will strike the PC industry. With more and more people going for small footprint PCs, NetPCs will probably sell as much as Netbooks in the near future.

In the past, we have reviewed a couple of atom mainboards. So far, most of it are based on the Intel aging Intel 945GC and ICH7 chipsets to power the Intel Atom N270 processor. The onboard memory support is only up to DDR2-533MHz.

An aging chipset comes with a tested integrated graphics the GMA 950. These integrated graphics supports minimal features. The ICH7 that pairs with it supports the on board connectors etc.

With NVIDIA ION, that is going to change. The Zotac ION mainboard has an on board Intel Atom N330, a dual core processor that is clocked at 1.6GHz. The ION chipset which is basically a reinvention of the defunt MCP7A comes into play. This chipset is known as GeForce 9400M and comes with GPU Shader clock of 1.1GHz. It supports DX10, OpenGL 2.1, NVIDIA® CUDA™ and PhysX™ games with ease.

To power up the board is as easy as ABC. Just plug in the DC power supply that comes with the board and you are basically to rock and roll. Zotac also included 802.11n wireless networok module onboard for speedy wireless connection. It also has a HDCP compliant HDMI port for playback of protected video content. Audio can be pumped out of the system via S/PDIF. For the conventional display users, you can use DVI or D-SUB for dispay output.

 

 

 

 

 

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