ION vs AMD
For this article I decided to take a slightly more practical approach to performance, pricing and comparisons. NVIDIA would love for us to only compare the Zotac ION motherboard to the Intel 945G platform with the Atom 330 processor – something we have already done quite extensively in a previous review. The results were as we expected:I think our performance results speak for themselves: the NVIDIA ION
platform is by far the fastest we have seen for the netbook and small
form factor PC market. Before the GF9400M chipset, the very concept of
gaming on a netbook PC was simply wishful thinking; try starting up
Left 4 Dead on your Eee PC with integrated Intel 954GME graphics and
let me know how it goes…
It is important to note though that not everything will see a speed up – CPU based tasks like surfing the web and editing your Office documents will continue to operate at the speed of your processor. And in this case that means the Intel Atom. We saw in our gaming tests that the Atom CPU is definitely the bottleneck next to the GeForce 9400M GPU so I can’t help but wonder when the power of the chipset will be fully realized in the netbook and SFF markets.
It is important to note though that not everything will see a speed up – CPU based tasks like surfing the web and editing your Office documents will continue to operate at the speed of your processor. And in this case that means the Intel Atom. We saw in our gaming tests that the Atom CPU is definitely the bottleneck next to the GeForce 9400M GPU so I can’t help but wonder when the power of the chipset will be fully realized in the netbook and SFF markets.
Anywhere were the GPU was a factor, the ION platform did much better than the Intel platform though anywhere that the processor itself was the limiting factor the difference was negligible. We’ve already made that distinction and to me there was no need to repeat it – nothing has changed on the Zotac motherboard when it comes to performance.
What did change were the questions and requests I was getting for a comparison to other low cost computing platforms. The retail price of the motherboard I am testing today (the IONITX-A-U model) is about $189. With that budget in mind I decided to build a cheap offering on the AMD platform to see how it compared.
Cutting right to the chase, here is what I came up with:
In my view, this closely matches the functionality of the Zotac ION motherboard – CPU, motherboard with integrated graphics and power supply. The total for this AMD-based system was $187 – pretty damn close.
Yes, there are some major differences in these two offerings though: the Zotac motherboard is mini-ITX while the ASUS system is much larger: micro-ATX. Chassis will be different and because of that and the size of the system overall will definitely be larger. The ION platform will also use SIGNIFICANTLY less power overall than the AMD system which could be a major concern for consumers looking to build a silent system for an HTPC. But from a pure performance value comparison the two are directly competitive.
The Competitors
The AMD Athlon X2 based system was speced out as such:
- AMD Athlon X2 7750 @ 2.7 GHz
- Radeon XPress 3200
- 2GB DDR2-800 memory
- Western Digital 500GB Caviar Green HDD
- Windows Vista Ultimate x64 SP1
AMD Athlon X2 7750 Kuma CPU
AMD 780G IGP Graphics
The Zotac IONITX-A-U motherboard system was nearly identical:
- Intel Atom 330 CPU @ 1.60 GHz
- GeForce 9400M chipset and GPU (256MB shared frame buffer)
- 2GB DDR2-800 memory
- Western Digital 500GB Caviar Green HDD
- Windows Vista Ultimate x64 SP1
Intel Atom 330 CPU
NVIDIA ION IGP Graphics
For our benchmarks, I ran both systems through the following gauntlet:
- 3DMark06
- PCMark05
- SiSoft Sandra XII SP3
- CineBench 10
- Windows Media Encoder 9
- HDTach – SATA and USB
- Left 4 Dead
- PowerDVD 9 Blu-ray playback
