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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Pirks - Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - link
Jeebus, you'd prefer PCI-e x16 and Wi-Fi with uberslow CPU like Atom? If you check newegg you'll find a bunch of AM2 mini-ATX mobos better that this slow Intel p.o.s.Say this one http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...">http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8... has Wi-Fi and desktop DDR you love so much.
Ah, whatever, if you love uberslow CPUs so be it. I'll never get it why people buy Atom p.o.s. for desktops when there are so many excellent and cheap AM2 solutions around.
strikeback03 - Wednesday, May 13, 2009 - link
Notice he said LGA board, look at the last image on the last page. Not referring to the Atom board that was the subject of most of the article.kalrith - Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - link
I'm curious as to why this is in the video-card section and not in the motherboard sectionZingam - Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - link
PMU Versoin - don't these guys ever read what they type? And if that's a final version - I don't want to touch it. If there are mistakes like that I don't want to image what other bugs could they have implanted into it.DigitalFreak - Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - link
They must have the DailyTech guys proofread for them.AmdInside - Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - link
Just curious how well the motherboard w/ dual core ATOM would do with MAME? I am tempted to build a new HTPC on this but it must also play my MAME games smoothly.vajm1234 - Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - link
in b/w the winrar and WOW charts ""Once more, the Pentium 4 gets beat by the Atom 330 but loses to the Atom 230."" :PKidneyBean - Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - link
I hear that sometimes when you make a computer without any moving parts (using a flash drive) that sometimes a component will emit electrical buzzing noises. Did you hear anything like that?I may use this as a desktop computer.
KidneyBean - Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - link
Never mind, I wouldn't use this as a desktop computer. For me, any power savings would be cancelled by the slow performance.KidneyBean - Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - link
I like how you provided a comparison to the Pentium 4. I'm often upgrading people from older computers to newer ones and it's nice to be able to tell them how much faster the newer ones are. People who still have a high speed Pentium 4, and don't do gaming, are about at the point of needing to upgrade. Good job!