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
SYSMark 2007 Performance
Our journey starts with SYSMark 2007, the only all-encompassing performance suite in our review today. The idea here is simple: one benchmark to indicate the overall performance of your machine.
There's a 27% performance improvement realized in SYSMark 2007 when going from the single-core Atom 230 to the dual-core Atom 330. Even the Atom 330 is outperformed by the lowest end Celeron 420 by 43% however.
Note that in general application usage there's no significant performance difference between the Zotac Ion and the Intel D945GCLF2.
And before you get any ideas of replacing a modern day, low-end system with an Ion look at the E5300 score. The E5300 offers 3.4x the speed of the Atom 330. Granted you need a more expensive motherboard but compared to the Zotac Ion, it's not that much more expensive.
Adobe Photoshop CS4 Performance
To measure performance under Photoshop CS4 we turn to the Retouch Artists’ Speed Test. The test does basic photo editing; there are a couple of color space conversions, many layer creations, color curve adjustment, image and canvas size adjustment, unsharp mask, and finally a gaussian blur performed on the entire image.
The whole process is timed and thanks to the use of Intel's X25-M SSD as our test bed hard drive, performance is far more predictable than back when we used to test on mechanical disks.
Time is reported in seconds and the lower numbers mean better performance. The test is multithreaded and can hit all four cores in a quad-core machine.
This test was particularly surprising, because with four threads the Atom 330 is able to actually come within striking distance of the Celeron 420's performance - at a considerably lower power consumption. Once we transition to an even more multi-threaded environment where multi-core processors can always maintain a significant performance advantage over their single core brethren then it may be more efficient to toss a few Atom-cores at a problem than something like the Celeron 420. Hmm, perhaps Larrabee will be more useful than we thought...
The single-core Atom 230 is horrendously slow in this test. While the 330 could masquerade as a very low end microprocessor from the modern era, the 230 takes significantly longer to complete our test. No thanks.
The difference between Ion and the D945GCLF2 is negligible.
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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!