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
PAR2 Multithreaded Archive Recovery Performance
Par2 is an application used for reconstructing downloaded archives. It can generate parity data from a given archive and later use it to recover the archive
Chuchusoft took the source code of par2cmdline 0.4 and parallelized it using Intel’s Threading Building Blocks 2.1. The result is a version of par2cmdline that can spawn multiple threads to repair par2 archives. For this test we took a 708MB archive, corrupted nearly 60MB of it, and used the multithreaded par2cmdline to recover it. The scores reported are the repair and recover time in seconds.
Microsoft Excel 2007
Excel can be a very powerful mathematical tool. In this benchmark we're running a Monte Carlo simulation on a very large spreadsheet of stock pricing data.
Sony Vegas Pro 8: Blu-ray Disc Creation
Although technically a test simulating the creation of a Blu-ray disc, the majority of the time in our Sony Vegas Pro benchmark is spend encoding the 25Mbps MPEG-2 video stream and not actually creating the Blu-ray disc itself.
Sorenson Squeeze: FLV Creation
Another video related benchmark, we're using Sorenson Squeeze to convert regular videos into Flash videos for use on websites.
WinRAR - Archive Creation
Our WinRAR test simply takes 300MB of files and compresses them into a single RAR archive using the application's default settings. We're not doing anything exotic here, just looking at the impact of CPU performance on creating an archive:
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Badkarma - Wednesday, May 13, 2009 - link
Thanks Anand, will definitely drop you a note regarding this over the weekend. It's quite unfortunate that Zotac left out Wake-On-USB for their 9300/9400 mobos, something many consider essential in an HTPC build.djc208 - Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - link
If I didn't have so many projects already I'd seriously consider one of these as the basis of a CarPC system. It's not cheap but a good touchscreen car monitor will run you far more.NNix - Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - link
On page 5: "Once more, the Pentium 4 gets beat by the Atom 330 but loses to the Atom 230"I hope you will review Cortex A8-based Netbooks once they show up. Because Im not impressed at all with Atom, not when looking at <45W dualcore Athlons. Taking into account that those are at 65nm aswell the Atom aint looking that efficient.
nubie - Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - link
I would take a Celeron 420 any day of the week over an Atom or a dualcore athlon ;)GaryJohnson - Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - link
Celery is for eating, not computing.nubie - Wednesday, May 13, 2009 - link
"Celery is for eating, not computing."Sorry, let me be perfectly clear, I would like a Core2 Conroe-L from 1.6-2.0 ghz (every one I have used will easily go over 3 ghz with no voltage increase)
Look at the raw numbers between the Atom and the Conroe-L and tell me on a desktop/stationary machine (IE not a netbook) you wouldn't rather have something more than twice as powerful.
I realize it is called a "celeron", but it is the most freaking powerful (Core2 architecture) Celeron ever sold.
They cost $25-35 on ebay, the LGA 775 version of this board is only $139. It makes a whole lot of sense if you don't plan on running it on battery power.
Not to mention you can move all the way up to a Quad if you want, but a $60 e5200 2.5ghz 2MB Level 2 Cache seems like a perfect match.
Oh, and you get a PCI-e 2.0 X16 slot :P http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...">http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
For $10 more it makes a whole lot of sense. (If you already have the LGA 775 chip laying around it makes even more sense.)
npp - Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - link
What could have made this board perfect is a PCI-E slot to stick some decent audio in. Anyone seen mini PCI-E sound cards around :)Visual - Wednesday, May 13, 2009 - link
Why would you want a sound card for any computer made in the last 10 years? Even with the fanciest card, there would not be even one bit of difference on the digital outputs, which are the ones you should be connecting to your receiver. On the analog outputs there will be quality differences indeed, but if you're using them you deserve what you get :p Besides, I get the feeling you wouldn't notice the difference anyway as if you're that stupid to be using them you are also probably using some crappy speakers.flipmode - Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - link
"Everyone seemed to want a Ion based motherboard after I first previewed the platform."Yeah, it is all because of you :roll:
Is that x264 encoding that you used to test power consumption? Why that? The most power draw likely comes from the chipset. Test Blu-Ray playback or something.
Pandamonium - Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - link
The first comment was pretty rude and uncalled for, I must say.I wanted to see an Ion-based HTPC after the preview and this article confirmed that an Ion-based HTPC is what I should set my sights on next. The only improvement Zotac could have made is to include a PCIe slot for TV tuners, audio, or beefed up video. A higher rated Atom would be nice too, but I don't even know that one exists.