Zotac's Ion: The World's First mini-ITX Ion Board
by Anand Lal Shimpi on May 12, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Gaming Performance
The gaming performance of Intel’s basic Atom platform is a joke. I’ll put aside debates of whether or not you would want to game on an Atom for a moment. World of Warcraft does a great job of straddling the line between casual and hardcore gaming and thus makes a good candidate for looking at gaming performance of Ion vs. Intel’s standard Atom platform.
I tested by running through a small outdoor section at 800 x 600 (24-bit color, no AA) using WoW’s built in “Good” visual quality settings. This is the same chart from the Pentium 4 section but I'm repeating it here so you have something to look at while we discuss the gaming potential of Ion:
The Ion platform managed just under 18 fps, which wasn’t incredibly smooth to play on but it was close. If I dropped the settings even lower I could easily get a smooth experience. The Intel D945GCLF2 managed a whopping 3 fps. I didn’t even bother benchmarking the single core version; I’m not that fond of single digits.
Most modern FPS games will show worse performance than what we just saw under WoW. Far Cry 2 and Crysis Warhead will give you under 7 fps for Zotac’s Ion platform, but other, more mainstream titles will perform similarly if not better.
I still maintain that the Atom CPU is not fast enough for a good gaming experience on far too many modern titles, but to NVIDIA’s credit, the Ion platform does make it fast enough in games that it otherwise wouldn’t be.
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ISHOULDCOCO - Thursday, May 14, 2009 - link
"In my quick testing the temperature of the heatsink did reach as much as 70-75C so I would use the fan in just about any installation locations." taken from PCPER.COM review"During Blu-ray playback, GPU temperatures rose to 72°C with the CPU cores between 76 and 79°C." Taken from TECHREPORT reveiw
Was this device tested WITHIN a case?
Is it truly a practical long-term Passivly cooled motherboard ?
COCO
ISHOULDCOCO - Thursday, May 14, 2009 - link
"In my quick testing the temperature of the heatsink did reach as much as 70-75C so I would use the fan in just about any installation locations." taken from PCPER.COM review"During Blu-ray playback, GPU temperatures rose to 72°C with the CPU cores between 76 and 79°C." Taken from TECHREPORT reveiw
Was this device tested WITHIN a case?
Is it truly a practical long-term Passivly cooled motherboard ?
COCO
strikeback03 - Thursday, May 14, 2009 - link
Did they mention what software they were checking that with? On my LF2 motherboard Speedfan is pretty much worthless, says fan readings are all over the place when it is at a constant speed and says the core temperatures are around 5 deg C.Otherwise, airflow in tiny cases can vary greatly, what cases sis those sites use?
TA152H - Wednesday, May 13, 2009 - link
I'm not sure the Pentium 4 is a few years old, since "few" generally means little more than one, not seven. The Northwood 2.66 came out in 2002.Even three years ago, you'd be comparing it to Pentium 4s running in the mid to high 3 GHz range, with dual cores, and hyper threading, and 200 MHz bus.
The Atom needs a better chipset choice. Intel's is obsolete, and Nvidia's is, well, Nvidia's. Who'd want either?
So, we're stuck with terribly slow processor paired with an obsolete, power hungry chipset, or we have to suffer with an Nvidia based chipset to get something more modern. What a choice. And, is the Atom so big they can't make it a real dual-core processor?
Intel had a good idea, but their execution has been horrible. Centaur solutions are better, even though I'm inclined to think the Atom is a good processor for a market it can't hit because of bad chipsets available for it. It's taking Intel too long to get out a decent chipset.
I'd like to see the Supermicro server motherboards reviewed with the Atom. For file serving, the Atom is fine, and the low power is very good. With a good chipset, this would be an ideal product for file servers. Heck, I run my webserver/gameserver with a K6-3+ 500 MHz (I'd still like to see AMD make a K6 derivative that competes with the Atom, instead of a K7/K8 based one that can't possible win) and it never gets pegged. Some workloads are perfect for the Atom. ... if they can get a !$#%!@#$ chipset for it that's decent.
Obsolete or Nvidia. Dumb or dumber. Good grief. This is something you'd expect from AMD.
strikeback03 - Thursday, May 14, 2009 - link
There is a more modern chipset for Atom, the US15. Almost no one seems to be using it though, not sure if it is just the cost or more artificial Intel limitations.Don't think Atom is really available to just be dropped in a motherboard, so if Supermicro makes a motherboard with an Atom processor in it then they could test that configuration. Otherwise probably out of luck.
Pandamonium - Thursday, May 14, 2009 - link
I happen to be very interested in this pairing. What's wrong with nVidia? Do you have any specific reasons?Intel's atom chipsets are pretty obsolete; I'll give you that. If Intel had an Atom chipset with a X4500HD IGP, I'd be interested. But as it stands, this is the next best alternative.
hamiltonguy - Wednesday, May 13, 2009 - link
I am intrigued about the possibility of using this as small secondary 7MC media center. curious about Live HD TV performance.StraightPipe - Wednesday, May 13, 2009 - link
Anybody know of some decent cases for this type of mobo?I'd love to see a couple of boxes for a HTPC and/or a carputer.
strikeback03 - Thursday, May 14, 2009 - link
You check out the usual suspects? mo-co-so.com, mini-box.com, logicsupply.com, etc...dman - Wednesday, May 13, 2009 - link
I'd like at least the option of using a regular PCIe slot on these. I think with an HVR2250 and Win7 it would make for a nice LOW POWER alternative to a less flexible / subscription based DVR. I know there are/were some 945 chipset boards that had the slots, but they had problem playing back HighDef. So, also, I know, cablecard won't work, I don't need it...Well, I'm sure they'll introduce one sooner or later. It's not an emergency and there are alternatives, but they do use a bit more power from what I've read.