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• Editor's Corner: Nvidia’s Ion Revisited, 7.1 Ch. LPCM Fixed

  When I first looked at Nvidia’s Ion platform last month, I tested in three different ways: as a desktop PC, as a gaming system, and as a home theater machine. Of course, this meant a lot of extra time was spent actually using the configuration that Zotac sent my way. During the course of testing, I convinced myself that I’d never be truly happy with Ion as a desktop system, even under Windows 7—the operating environment I used, assuming Vista would be too cumbersome. It was just too slow. Sitting there waiting for menus to pop and apps to open just isn’t my gig—and I suspect many of the enthusiasts who read Tom’s Hardware would feel the same about a new technology purchase. I also wasn’t impressed enough with Ion’s gaming performance to recommend it in such a role. Sure, I could jog around Ironforge using Fair settings in World of Warcraft, but who spends close to $200 on a motherboard/processor for that? When it comes to gaming, you could do much better for the money, or even a little more money. Intel suggested that Ion was overkill last week at Computex, and it was right. Nvidia’s GeForce 9300 platform is more chipset than the Atom processor can handle. Though, to be fair, we’re expecting more out of the architecture here than Intel designed it to deliver. Nevertheless, if there was one segment in which I suspected Ion might be able to succeed, it was the HTPC market, where GeForce 9300 could offload playback of HD video content and, hopefully, factor Atom right out of the picture. Ion In The Theater Given the platform’s GeForce 9300 foundation, which includes the latest generation of Nvidia’s PureVideo (VP3) technology, hardware offload of MPEG-2, VC-1, and AVC (H.264) is fully enabled—a good omen for using an Atom-based PC in a home theater environment. Additionally, the chipset was said to support 7.1-channel LPCM audio over its HDMI output. Now, this feature is more important than you might realize at first. If you’re watching Blu-ray content on a big-screen TV in a home theater, there’s also a good chance you’re using six- or eight-channel surround sound. There are actually a few different ways to achieve multi-channel audio with your HTPC. Perhaps most familiar to the PC crowd is through a TOSLINK optical (or S/PDIF coaxial) output connected to your receiver. You can transmit encoded Dolby Digital and DTS signals over an optical cable, but not Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD Master Audio—the two optional, lossless formats commonly featured on Blu-ray movies. In order to play back TrueHD (with a maximum bitrate of 18 Mb/s) or DTS-HD (with a maximum bitrate of 24.5 Mb/s), you have to use an HDMI 1.3 connection. Hallelujah, Ion has that. From there, you have two options. You can either pass the encoded Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD signal to your receiver, which performs the decode and plays back the lossless studio soundtrack in all of its glory, or use your DVD software to decode the signal and pass multi-channel linear PCM over the HDMI output (so long as it’s supported). The problem with the former is that it requires a protected audio path—otherwise your decoding software will fall back to lossy codecs like Dolby Digital and DTS. We’re still waiting on a chipset that’ll do this, but right now the only component in the lab capable of it is Asus’ Xonar HDAV 1.3 sound card, a $200+ add-on. Incidentally, this is how you get your receiver to light up with the TrueHD or DTS-HD logos (meaning the receiver is leveraging its built-in decoding capabilities). The problem with the latter is that it requires specific platform support. For instance, ATI’s 780G/790GX will only pass stereo LPCM (you can do AC3 and DTS, though). Nvidia's GeForce 9300 and Intel's G45 both support 7.1-channel LPCM over HDMI.  As an aside, and for the record, this is the way Sony’s Playstation 3 is able to serve up TrueHD and DTS-HD playback. You don’t get the little lights on your receiver flashing Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD Master Audio, but you can view the playback status as a movie is playing and see the PS3 is doing the decoding, then sending uncompressed LPCM to your receiver.    Well, Ion supposedly supported multi-channel LPCM via HDMI. However, in my initial review, I revealed that, despite Nvidia’s claims, Ion wasn’t outputting multi-channel audio in either Windows Vista or Windows 7, in either PowerDVD 9 or TotalMedia Theater 3. Had it been a persistent flaw, that would have been a deal-breaker for Ion as an HTPC solution. Fortunately, I was able to work with both Nvidia and CyberLink to get PowerDVD 9 working properly under Windows 7. The latest build, 1719, properly enables multi-channel LPCM output via HDMI (TotalMedia Theatre still doesn’t work).

• Spore The choice of games that can be tested on both platforms is fairly restrictive due to their power and performance limitations—you can forget about trying to run Crysis, for example. We chose a “casual” game that’s representative of the kind of game netbook or nettop purchasers might want to run--one that Nvidia picked to show off the merits of its chipset at CES: Spore. The first lesson here is that the Atom is really short on headroom. Even when we lowered the resolution and the level of detail, it was hard to reach an average of 25 fps. The fact that increasing the resolution for a given level of graphics detail hardly made a difference shows that the CPU is where the bottleneck is. The second lesson was that the GeForce 9400M was the only chip that was able to achieve playable frame rates, up to low-detail at a resolution of 1280x1024. For a game like Spore, 25 frames per second is sufficient. Finally, compared to the Intel platform, the Ion showed an average gain of 73% at 800x600, 160% at 1024x768, and 145% at 1280x1024. Such differences prove that even an Atom is powerful enough to be limited by the 945GC chipset’s integrated GPU. Call of Duty 4 The second game Nvidia says is a good demonstration of the Ion’s capabilities is Call of Duty 4, better known as “CoD4” to its fans. Our 945GC motherboard stubbornly refused to launch CoD4, despite repeated attempts and reinstallations. Oddly, we were expecting an error pointing to an incompatibility of the graphics card, but it was the motherboard’s sound circuitry that seemed to be the problem—even when we disabled it in the BIOS. Whatever the reason, we can only confirm Nvidia’s predictions: CoD4 will not run on an Intel 945GC/Atom motherboard. On the Ion, CoD4 fired up with no problem. But the frame rates we achieved were nothing to write home about. At the lowest resolution that’s available in the game settings--640x480--with all the detail cursors set to the minimum, Ion couldn’t quite reach the threshold of 25 fps. Fortunately, it wasn’t all that far from that level, and for an uncompetitive player (somebody who’d play the game on a nettop or netbook and not mind getting blasted at regular intervals) it might be good enough. You might even be able to move up to 800x600 or activate 2x AA without losing too much fluidity.

• Intel: Content With The Crown We met briefly with Intel, but already knew that the company didn’t have much to talk about so close on the heels of its Core i7 launch. Representatives reiterated plans for the mainstream Core i7 variant later this year with on-chip graphics, a different socket interface, and two channels of DDR3 memory support. We also talked a bit about Nvidia’s Ion platform and Intel conceded that supply of the popular Atom processors is currently tight. However, the chip is, in fact, available in one of two forms: by itself or in a package with Intel’s complementary chipset, which jives with what we heard from Nvidia. In essence, it all boils down to price. Afterward, we spent some time meandering around Intel’s large booth and ran into the guys from Hardcore Computers. They had their Reactor system on display, which is unlike any machine we’ve ever seen. It starts with a 790i motherboard sourced from Tyan and attached to a rack-like tray, which drops down into a large reservoir that is, in fact, the body of the chassis. Depending on the model you choose, the platform includes anything from a Core 2 Duo E8600 to a Core 2 Extreme QX9650 onboard. Some of the base specs look a little anemic, like 2 GB of DDR3 and a single 1 TB hard drive on the $4,500 Reactor Pro, but Hardcore does offer customization to up that to 4 GB. Of course, if you’re really swimming in cash, you can take the Reactor to its limit with optional SLC SSDs, 3-way SLI using GeForce GTX 280s, and redundant 650 W power supplies. But the feature common to all Reactor configurations is Hardcore’s total submersion cooling system, whereby all of the components inside are surrounded by a synthetic, non-conductive (obviously) coolant. It was hard to tell on the noisy show floor, but the result of a design like that is naturally going to be quiet operation as the array of fans found in air-cooled machines get cut down to one 250 cfm blower. There’s a lot of custom work that went into bringing the Reactor to market, so it’s hardly a surprise that Hardcore isn’t quite ready with its next-generation design. Nevertheless, the company says it’s still selling the systems based on Core 2 processors, and is completely comfortable putting the Reactor up against competing i7-based configurations. We’re looking forward to getting one of the boxes in-house in the near future. Sapphire Talks Re-Worked Radeons Nvidia is on the offensive right now with its GeForce GTX 295 and GTX 285 graphics cards, based on a new 55 nm manufacturing process from TSMC. As we’ll see over the next couple of days, both boards challenge AMD in areas where it has enjoyed significant success over the past six months. AMD’s Radeon HD 4870 1 GB and HD 4870 X2 cards have taken the company a long way in attracting enthusiast affection, but now it knows it needs to counter Nvidia’s moves. In talking to Sapphire, we learned that, in addition to significant price cuts on the Radeon HD 4870 X2 (expected to take it to $399 after mail-in-rebate or $449 without), the company will also be re-working its Radeon HD 4850 X2, at the very least, to offer more compelling performance against Nvidia’s latest creations. If you were looking to scoop up a good deal on the 4850 X2, it might be worth waiting until those cards get whatever tweak Sapphire has planned. Our own Don Woligroski had encountered some issues with the Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 X2 chosen for his last System Builder Marathon. Because that card remains a Sapphire exclusive, drivers still need to come from the company’s own Website rather than from AMD's. However, there are a new BIOS and driver available, which are said to fix the issues we were encountering last month.