I've been looking at Atom-based mobos for months now. I'm not sure this review does the uCPU justice.

In my investigation, this motherboard of all the Zotac Atom and other vendor mobos is the *least* desirable for a builder feature-wise. I would really have liked to have seen the Atom/ION evaluated on the 'Point of View ION-MB330 Dual Core 1.6GHz Atom N330 Mini-ITX Motherboard' or at least the 'Zotac IONITX-A-U Atom N330 1.6GHz Dual-Core 441 NVIDIA ION Mini ITX Motherboard'. It would also have been very informative to quantitatively contrast it to the Intel Atom 'benchmark' design.

In addition, this article made no mention of using the Atom/ION as a Home Server. Lots of users are using Atoms for Home Servers. The extreme low-power consumption and the low-horse power needed for byte swapping are ideal for an Atom. I would like to have seen an evaluation of any of the above mobos with Windows Home Server.

In general I thought this was a poor review. It did not properly compare and contrast the Atom/ION quantitatively with the alternatives. It chose the least desirable (IMO) motherboard to test. It ignored the Home Server application space. Not what I expected from Xbit Labs.

This is the future according to nvidia - cheap general purpose intel processor to run windows + powerful nvidia gpu to do all the hard work. Same concept as the cell really, only x86 instead of the PPE, and nvidia cores instead of the SPE's.

2 mistakes in the article:
- you mentioned that nVidia chipset is 10.1 capable (dooh!)
- and you insist that 90W PSU is "huge overkill". However, you forget that peak usage of that board is those 30W+3x12W for hard drives which is already ~70W, and than add 2 fans, USB mouse, keyboard, and other peripherals, and you'll be getting close to 90W consumption. So no - 90W isn't overkill, it's a PSU with safe margin. Interestingly enough, when people keep buying 800W PSUs for single-CPU/single-GPU computers you think it's ok, and those computer typically consume 300-400W. So I believe this to be a huge over-statement

Other than this, nice article, again confirms I should stay away from anything-Atom, no matter how nice they seem at first...

Hi,

How about comparing ION platform to a gateway lt3100 for comparison purposes? Athlon L110+Radeon x1270