Not so long ago we offered you a preview of Nvidia ION platform – another Nvidia’s attempt to settle in the chipset market. Taking advantage of the consumer interest to affordable compact platforms that emerged for a number of reasons, the company proposed to mix energy-efficient Intel Atom processors with their own GeForce 9300 chipset that boasts a pretty powerful integrated graphics core. As a result, they ended up creating a very interesting solution: by joining together low-performance processor and high-performance graphics ION platform used as a basis for nettops and netboks could shoot for a wider application field than the models from Intel using previous generation integrated chipsets, like i945G, for instance. Our experiments showed, ION could serve not only as a basis for primitive home systems that could only suit for web-surfing over sites with minimal Flash usage, launch simple office tasks and casual games, play music and allow picture galleries viewing. Besides everything mentioned above, GeForce 9300 graphics processor can playback HD video with minimal CPU utilization. This specific feature that Nvidia marketing specialists have been stressing particularly, became the primary reason for increased user interest to Nvidia ION platform. Of course, ION can’t become a fully-functional home platform, because its low-performance processor makes it impossible to play comfortably any contemporary 3D games, including even multi-player online titles that do not require that many resources. However, ION has every chance to become a great multimedia home platform. Especially, since it has a number of other important advantages that will be welcomed by home users, such as compact size and low power consumption and heat dissipation.

In other words, Nvidia ION has certain perspective, we can’t deny that. However, the fact that it uses Intel Atom processor did have a serious impact on its market availability. Intel is very reluctant to supply these CPUs without their companion chips with system core logic. However, some company managed to overcome these difficulties and start mass production of solutions built on Intel Atom and Nvidia GeForce 9300. Among them are ready systems, such as compact nettop computers, as well as mainboards that can be used to build a system like that on your own. Our today’s article will be devoted to the latter case: we received a mainboard from Zotac that features integrated Nvidia ION platform components – Intel Atom 230 processor and GeForce 9300 chipset.

Just like the reference ION platform, this mainboard boasts very small size: it is designed in Mini-ITX form-factor. We have recently tested mainboards like that equipped with LGA775 processor socket. Our today’s hero, of course, can’t compete with those solutions in performance, but nevertheless, it can become a pretty interesting choice for systems that do not target high computational potential in the first place. Especially, since Intel Atom processor will offer way better heat dissipation and power consumption levels than any of the LGA775 solutions. It means that Mini-ITX ION mainboards can be installed into considerably smaller system cases than the mainboards of the same form-factors but equipped with LGA775 CPUs. In other words, ION mainboard can potentially deliver very unexpected surprises and definitely deserves a closer look.