Power Consumption

Although we were not very impressed with the performance of Zotac ION-ITX-C platform because of a slow single-core processor, it has a strong advantage over the solutions equipped with dual-core Atom CPUs. I am talking about lower power consumption and as a result, the absence of any fans, which means that the system will be completely noiseless during work. However, how will the use of a passive cooling solution not only on the CPU but also on a pretty “power-hungry” chipset affect their temperature? It is a good question and we are going to perform special tests to answer it. During our thermal tests we also took the system power consumption from the wall outlet.

We used LinX 0.5.8 to load the CPU and FureMark 1.6.5 to load the graphics core. Temperature tests during video playback were performed using Windows 7 default player – Windows Media Player 12 – and a movie recorded in H.264 format with 1080p resolution. The tests were run in an open testbed, outside the system case:

As you can notice, even though the passive cooling implemented on Zotac ION-ITX-C mainboard is sufficient in the sense that the board doesn’t get overheated, the chipset and mostly processor temperature modes are far from favorable. From the numbers in the table above you can see that all our concerns came true and GeForce 9300 chipset does in fact heat up the CPU substantially via the mutual heatsink, even if the CPU itself is not really loaded heavily. We would like to remind you that on Intel mainboards equipped with the same Atom 230 processor, where an individual miniature passive heatsink is used to dissipate the heat from the CPU, the CPU temperature in burn mode doesn’t exceed 40-50 °C.

It is also important to keep in mind that the temperature of Aton 230 on Zotac ION-ITX-C mainboard exceeded 80 °C threshold even in an open testbed. In this case it is logical to assume that when this mainboard is installed into compact system cases, it will need active cooling. According to the manufacturer recommendations, the maximum temperature for Atom 230 processor shouldn’t exceed 85 °C. In other words, the use of a single passive heatsink without a fan for the chipset and the CPU seems to be a pretty careless solution on Zotac’s part.

As for the power consumption, Zotac ION-ITX-C mainboard proved much better here. This board will be an excellent choice for nettops, due to its exceptional energy-efficiency. Even in the “heaviest” modes the total power consumption in our tests never exceeded 32 W. Therefore, it seems to be excessive to bundle Zotac ION-ITX-C with a 90 W PSU.