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• Using Ion. I Mean Really Using It.

  It’d be easy to set this platform up on an open-air test bench, marvel at its size, rattle off its specs, run a couple of benchmarks that show it to be better than Intel’s own Atom-based boards, and give it an award. There’s nothing wrong with open-air testing. There’s nothing wrong with specs, benchmarks, or awards, for that matter. But you’re not going to get the feel of this diminutive little box unless you use it. So, with a HTPC usage model in mind and the issues first encountered in our review addressed, I built up a mini-ITX system around Zotac’s Ion offering, using Windows 7, 2 GB of DDR2 memory, an OCZ SSD, and a slim Blu-ray player that Nvidia was kind enough to send along. Let’s start with DVD playback. This is one area where the Ion is destined to shine given its GPU-based hardware capabilities. I played through several Blu-ray titles with Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio, and they were delivered smoothly. Though my modest theater room isn’t large enough for 7.1-channel sound to make sense, PowerDVD 9 had no trouble decoding the latest lossless codecs and outputting a 5.1-channel LPCM stream to my Onkyo SR507. All in all, as a platform for playing movies, Ion handles business—though once you’re done buying storage, memory, and a chassis, I almost wonder if it wouldn’t be easier to just grab that Playstation instead.  Next up is TV programming. I don’t watch any cable television, but I do hit Hulu on occasion when I eat dinner in front of the PC. The site employs Adobe Flash 9, which is going to need to be processed on the dual-core Atom processor. And indeed, this becomes a problem. In watching the pilot for Glee, it simply wasn’t possible to go full-screen at either low-res (320p) or high-res (480p) on my 50” Samsung running at 1280x720 (in the words of my wife, “It’s too distracting to try watching like this Let me know when you’re done playing around”). The standard browser window mode worked fine, but from 10 feet away, you’re really defeating the purpose of pulling this platform into a home theater environment. Of course, I didn’t expect .mp3 playback to be an issue, so I tried to give the Ion setup a slightly more challenging task constrained by I/O performance instead: streaming audio wirelessly from a NAS attached to the network via Gigabit Ethernet, while indexing a folder in the background. This is something that happens almost-transparently on most desktops; however, it brought this HTPC build to a stuttering stand-still (even with an SSD). Purpose-Built HTPC, Perhaps Fortunately for me, movies are all I really do in the theater room. For that purpose, Ion works. And it’s hard to argue against the board’s form factor (though, to that end, I’m still a fan of the LGA-775 mini-ITX alternative). Keep your expectations in line on this one, though. Any time you’re not taking advantage of the GeForce 9300’s GPU acceleration, you’re at the mercy of Intel’s Atom CPU. On the desktop, that’s really a recipe for frustration.

• Zotac's Ion Board On Windows 7: Nvidia Re-Arms Intel’s Atom

  We’ve done a ton of Atom-oriented content, from reviewing the processor’s merits on its own, to pitting it against Athlon and Nano, to testing it in a ready-made machine and evaluating performance under Windows Vista. When we say the CPU is an enabler in the netbook market, but sorely lacking as a solution to your desktop needs, we’re basing that judgment on almost a year’s worth of power and performance data. Of course, we’re also grouping Intel’s accompanying 945G-series chipsets in with that opinion, since they have been, up until now, the only core logic accompanying Atom processors. Earlier this year, we were able to take a sneak peek at the first platform with Atom support able to go up against Intel’s own anemic Atom-oriented chipsets: Nvidia’s Ion. First encountered at this year’s CES, we were impressed by just how much modern connectivity and GPU muscle the company had crammed into its proof-of-concept design. We were told to expect more Ion-related news in the months to come. Now, almost six months later (and after the announcement of Acer’s AspireRevo nettop), we’re seeing the first mini-ITX motherboard based on the Ion concept, which means the do-it-yourselfers out there now have their own path to pursing an Ion-based platform. Will they want to, though? That’s the question we’re setting out to answer here. Nvidia’s Ion: Stepping Out That first Ion concept was truly stacked. It included lots of USB 2.0, analog 7.1-channel output, optical output, DVI, HDMI, Gigabit Ethernet, and SATA storage connectivity. As you already know, that box’s capabilities come from the Nvidia GeForce 9300 chipset, which the company is now calling its Ion Graphics Processor (IGP—get it?). As a quick recap, the GeForce 9300 (or IGP as we’ll call it from here on out) is a single-chip solution that combines the functionality common to most northbridge and southbridge chipset components. Exceptional I/O includes support for up to five PCI slots, six SATA 3 Gb/s ports, a total of 20 PCI Express 2.0 lanes across five links (1 x 16-lane and 4 x 1-lane), integrated Gigabit Ethernet, 12 USB 2.0 ports, and HD Audio. The northbridge-y features include a dual-channel memory controller able to accommodate either DDR2-800 modules or DDR3 at speeds of up to 1,333 MHz. Nvidia claims front side bus speeds of up to 1,333 MHz, supporting Atom, Celeron, Pentium 4, and Core 2 processors. Temper your excitement about those modern memory and bus settings, though. The Atom 330 soldered onto Zotac’s board sports a 533 MHz FSB and communicates with DDR2 modules-only. And then there’s the integrated graphics. Derived from Nvidia’s G86 GPU, the IGP sports 16 shader processors and relies on shared system memory. The graphics core runs at 450 MHz while the shaders operate at 1,100 MHz—down a bit, actually, from the GeForce 9300 we reviewed last October. With the chipset specifics out of the way, let’s take a look at how Zotac has turned Nvidia’s IGP into a mini-ITX motherboard.

• Ion As An HTPC

  This is perhaps the most viable application of Nvidia’s Ion platform. As such, I saw it fit to test under Windows Vista and the release candidate of Windows 7. We’ll start with Windows 7, since that’s the unchartered territory many software vendors are still trying to conquer. Bear in mind that the operating system is still in pre-production and that hardware/software vendors still have a lot of work to do before their products are officially ready to support this upcoming OS. I tested with two different DVD decoding apps: CyberLink’s PowerDVD 9 Ultra and ArcSoft’s TotalMedia Theater 3 Platinum. Video quality looked fine on both (and the pair recognized and properly enabled Nvidia’s PureVideo HD technology). Audio was a different story, though. At first, PowerDVD wanted to pass PCM audio decoded by the software to the lab's brand new Onkyo TX-SR507; it wouldn’t send the undecoded Dolby Digital/DTS signal. Unfortunately, even while 5.1-channel HDMI was enabled in Windows, the software was only outputting two channels of sound. TotalMedia Theater 3 did the same thing, but it had a significant advantage in that it worked much more smoothly with the Windows 7 Media Center interface. Thinking that there might be an issue with Ion and multi-channel output, we loaded a drive with Vista and tried both decoding apps one more time. Under TotalMedia Theater 3, we were successfully able to get DTS and Dolby Digital pass-through, but the same configuration just wouldn’t work under PowerDVD 9. The video playback was sporadic—almost as if PureVideo HD wasn’t being properly utilized—and there was no sound output at all. Nvidia followed up with an updated HDMI driver update for Windows 7. The update let us successfully pass DD/DTS through to both decoding apps, but as of this writing, PowerDVD 9 still won't handle the decode and send multi-channel linear PCM to the receiver (even though we confirmed support by running the test in Windows' audio control panel). Ion’s Home Theater Strengths Despite the software troubles we had under Windows 7 and Vista, we still see a lot of potential in this tiny platform—almost all of which is derived from its Nvidia IGP core logic. The combination of PureVideo HD 3 and 7.1-channel LPCM output through HDMI enable an almost-perfect A/V solution, providing the audio support can be straightened out through updated drivers.  We didn’t measure CPU utilization with any VC-1-based movies (the main improvements from VP2 to VP3 was in VC-1 bitstream decoding), but we did test with several H.264 titles and saw utilization in the range of 25-35% (Live Free or Die Hard, 28 Mb/s, for instance, was fairly steady at 25%). That’s a true testament to the work Nvidia’s chipset is offloading from the host processor. As a result, in our best-case configuration of Windows Vista and ArcSoft’s TotalMedia Theater 3, we were able to enjoy smooth high-def video playback and DTS audio from this silent, tiny platform. Ion’s Home Theater Weaknesses Clearly there is still software work to be done. With that said, it’s hard to fault IHVs and ISVs for coming up short in a release candidate operating system. Instead, we’ll focus on our experiences in Vista. Once you’re watching your movie, Ion’s performance is great, and that’s because Nvidia is doing the heavy lifting. But getting to that point still feels like slogging through molasses. Launching Media Center, loading the decoding engine, reading optical media—actually using the system becomes frustrating for enthusiasts accustomed to more desktop-oriented processors. Here’s another wrinkle: because neither PowerDVD nor TrueMedia Theater are certified by the AACS LA for use with Ion, you can’t bitstream TrueHD or DTS-HD over HDMI to your AVR. The workaround, of course, is having your decoder software do the job and output multi-channel LPCM. But as I’ve already mentioned, we weren’t able to get PowerDVD to output more than two channels of PCM audio in Windows 7 (or anything at all under Vista). Hopefully this will get worked out soon. Finally, we had some resolution issues with the Zotac board in a home theater environment. Regardless of whether it was connected to our lab’s DLP directly or through an HDMI 1.3a repeater (using Onkyo’s TX-SR507), it’d default to 1176x664. Manually setting it to 1280x720 resulted in the picture overshooting both axes.