Introduction
When Intel released the ATOM processor, the phenomenon of Nettop and netbooks exponentially started to grow. Thing is, people like the cheap little Windows based PC's or laptops where they can just browse the web, check their email, perhaps do a little word processing or spreadsheet and other than that they figure it's all good.
The heart of such products is based on an Intel Atom processor. Intel as such reaped a lot of profit from their Atom series processor product. And especially for the nettop and netbook market, it's a golden egg. And dominant as they are, Intel actually forces the manufacturers to purchase the Atom processor with their in-house chipset, something I think is still illegal in the EU and have never understood somebody to pursue.
The downside of that magic couple is that you get to have a rather slow dull PC. I mean sure it's good for everyday average usage, but the minute you want little more bite, that's where the ATOM combo with the Intel 945GC chipset bites you in the ass. It's dog slow, a single channel chipset and limited in many ways.
Earlier this year it was then NVIDIA who figured, hmm why not couple the Atom processor with one of our chipsets. And the rest is history, NVIDIA launched the ION chipset allowing for much more interconnectivity, bandwidth and an embedded GPU allowing high-definition content playback. A chipset that assists the Atom series processor in a much more advanced way than Intel offers.
ION is a relatively low cost GPU assisted solution that will allow this industry on very short notice to have netbooks with full HD playback quality, in multi-channel HD audio. A solution that even supports CUDA and therefore some simple PhysX functionality, but since it's CUDA compatible, it'll also allow encoding and acceleration of popular video content. A platform that supports Gigabit Ethernet, dual-link DVI (high resolution monitors), acceleration in Photoshop CS4 and heck... you can even play a couple of games or make a mini HTPC out of it, it's just really interesting as the product might be little, yet offers a lot.
Roughly half a year ago this was the news of the day, and today... finally the first products start to hit the market. One of many ION based products comes from Point of View. Next to nettops, and netbooks based on ION, for the somewhat more hardware freaks like us... they also offer an ION motherboard.
Today we'll look at one. For roughly 140 EUR you can pick up this tiny little thing with an Atom 330 (dual-core) processor and build yourself a tiny cute PC. And sure, in essence you can look at these products like building a slow PC. But for the money you drop on it, it's a fairly nice build. And these ION motherboards surely do come with a bucketload of features and versitility compared to Intel's last gen offering.
Let's have a peek shall we?
