NVIDIA's ION chipset gives an Intel Atom (or VIA Nano) processor the graphics and connectivity capabilities their stock chipsets to date haven't been able to provide. Zotac's ION-ITX-A is the first Mini-ITX board to utilise this chipset. It has the potential to be the perfect board for the HTPC market. We put one through its paces - concentrating primarily on power consumption and video playback.

Zotac ION-ITX-A Review

Other ION-ITX-A reviews around the web:

AnandTech | Toms Hardware | PCPerspective
TechReport | HardwareZone | TechTree | Inpai

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Zotac have hit the ground running with their recent entries into the Mini-ITX world, and have now built what could be the perfect Media PC motherboard with their new range of nVidia ION powered products. We'll be reviewing this one shortly, but in the meantime here are some unboxing photos as we're rather excited about it all. Click to biggify.

The review board we received was the ION-ITX-A, which is a dual core Atom N330 powered unit with NVidia ION chipset. The biggest difference we expect to see versus a standard Atom is the graphics, which are Geforce 9400M powered supporting PureVideo HD, PhysX, DirectX 10 and CUDA H264 acceleration...

..which means 1080p HD playback from an embedded Mini-ITX board with a fanless 1.6GHz processor whilst consuming 21W.

The ION-ITX-A has its own DC converter onboard, and is supplied with a 90W AC Adapter. This makes it the ideal companion to the M350 Universal Mini-ITX Cases which just arrived at the store. But more about that later.

There's also a more traditional ION-ITX-B which is a fanless 1.6GHz single core N230 with everything the A has bar the Wi-Fi and DC converter. We expect we'll see C and D versions too, but not just yet.

Brief specification: nVidia ION Chipset; Single or Dual Core 1.6GHz Atom CPU; 21W-25W power consumption; VGA, DVI, HDMI, S/PDIF Coax & Optical; 3x SATA; eSATA; 6x USB (+4 headers); Serial header; PS/2 Keyboard; 802.11/n Wi-Fi and DC power input on the 'A' version.

Plenty more information, photos and pre-ordering on the store page:

Zotac ION boards at the Mini-ITX Store

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NVIDIA's ION reference platform squeezes a 1.6GHz dual core Atom 330 processor and GeForce 9400GM chipset onto a Pico-ITX board inside a suspiciously ARTiGO-like enclosure.

The keyword here is reference - NVIDIA have built a small number of units to demonstrate the graphics chipset that they would like to see power the next generation of Atom-powered netbooks later this year. Sadly, the world's fastest Pico-ITX isn't going to be available in the shops any time soon (or perhaps even at all).

Intel aren't resting on their laurels, and will be integrating graphics directly into the next generation of Atom CPU in the form of their (codenamed) 'Pine Trail-D' platform. Both technologies are expected sometime from the second half of 2009.

All of this is good news for Mini-ITX, as low power consumption mobile technology is fair game to be repurposed onto Mini-ITX motherboards, and both technologies look extremely promising.

The netbook market is many times larger than Mini-ITX, but we may still see a 9400GM chipset on our favourite 17 x 17cm form factor. Intel have supported Mini-ITX with their own Atom Mini-ITX boards recently and we don't expect that to stop with Pineview.

NVIDIA have crammed the ports into their demo ION units, utilising two sides of the case. HDMI, DVI, Gigabit Ethernet and USB on one side, eSATA, more USB and plenty of Audio outputs on the other. Early reviews of the ION show it to have advantages in the 3D graphics, H264 decoding and encoding departments - exactly as you would expect from NVIDIA.

PC Perspective and Hot Hardware both got their hands on an ION and you can check out their reviews here:

PC Perspective looks at the ION

Hot Hardware looks at the ION

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We've had a chance to poke around inside an ARTiGO A2000, courtesy of the mini-itx store. Our ISO standard size reference cylinder is in the foreground of the first picture.

The inside is surprisingly sparse. The 1.5GHz N701 motherboard inhabits the rear of the case, only slightly larger than the standard 80mm fan. The only other circuit boards in the case distribute power and data to the SATA drives and connect the front panel to the Nano-ITX motherboard, which accepts 12V directly from the DC socket on the back.

Everything comes cabled up, ready to go. Slide in a hard drive or two and perhaps a compact flash card with your NAS OS of choice and you have your own custom NAS in 5 minutes.

ARTiGO A2000 at the Mini-ITX Store

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VIA have entered the DIY NAS market with the ARTiGO A2000 Barebones Storage Server - a fully featured 1.5GHz low power consumption PC motherboard inside a dual 3.5in SATA drive bay chassis.

The A2000 is powered by a custom Nano-ITX board with 1.5GHz C7-D Processor and VX800 Chipset supporting up to 2GB of DDR2 SODIMM memory. Two 3.5in SATA drive bays support 3TB of storage with 1.5TB drives installed. A bootable type 1 Compact Flash adapter is located underneath the board, perfect for locating a NAS OS. The whole unit measures just 135 x 120 x 260 mm (5.3 x 4.7 x 10.2in) and is supplied with an external AC power adapter.

The front of the A2000 sports Power, LAN activity, LAN speed, WLAN and HDD activity LEDs as well as Power and Reset switches and a single USB 2.0 port.

The rear of the A2000 includes a Gigabit Ethernet port, support for a wireless 802.11 b/g module, two USB 2.0 ports, 3.5mm Mic and Line In and a VGA monitor output. System cooling is provided by a low-noise 8cm ball-bearing fan keeping noise levels at 26.8 dB.

The VIA ARTiGO A2000 supports Microsoft Windows XP and Vista, Ubuntu 8.04, SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 (Service Pack 2) and FreeBSD (so FreeNAS should work - update 11 Dec: it does). We'll be cracking one open in the next day or so and will see how well it performs with Openfiler...

If you're a fan of lounge music, VIA's unboxing video is here

VIA's ARTiGO A2000 information page

Buy an ARTiGO 2000 at the Mini-ITX Store

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The clever chaps at Cambridge University built an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle to compete in the Student Autonomous Underwater Challenge - Europe (SAUC-E). It was one of the smallest robots at the competition weighing in at just under 7kg, in part due to the tiny Pico-ITX motherboard used to power the autonomy software which guides it...

The SAUC-E competition is a Europe wide competition aimed at University level students. The teams design and build their own AUVs that must attempt an underwater assault course that may vary from year to year but can consist of gates, drop targets and surface zones that may have to be detected by visual or acoustic means.

The "CAUV 2008"

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In our multiple Atom board review, we cover the original Intel D945GCLF motherboard, Gigabyte's GA-GC230D, Jetway's JNC91, a board from MSI due to be released in the next few weeks, and Intel's Dual Core Atom 330 powered D945GCLF2 - released today (or thereabouts).

Five Atom Mini-ITX Boards Reviewed

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Aaron Shephards built himself a DVD burning robot to automate his backups. "Florian" picks up a DVD from a stack and places them in the DVD burner to be written. It then flips them over to be labelled, and even discards any bad disks into a naughty pile. All using self-built circuit boards, a few servos and servo controllers, plenty of LEDs, his own software written in Perl and components from local surplus shops. There's an EPIA M10000 motherboard in there too. Somewhere.

Aaron Shephards' "Florian"

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Tim Schellekens has built an inexpensive Monitor PC from Mini-ITX components and a 15in LCD Monitor found on eBay, loosely inspired by his brother in law's iMac.

This one's currently running Ubuntu.

Tim Schellekens' "i-EPIA"

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MSI look like they will be one of the first out of the blocks to release a Montevina-based Mini-ITX motherboard, after an early MS-9818 arrived at the Mini-ITX.com underground lair yesterday. The board is so new, we don't have a processor that will actually run on it.

Montevina is of course the codename for Intel's latest mobile platform, better known as Centrino 2. Mobile platforms have traditionally been a starting point for low power consumption Mini-ITX motherboard designs with socket CPUs.

Intel has introduced a range of 45nm dual core mobile processors together with the Centrino 2 platform, all of which are supported by the MS-9818. For instance the P8400 runs at 2.26GHz with a TDP of just 25W, whilst the 2.8GHz T9600 has a TDP of 35W. For the speed freaks there is the 3.06GHz X9100 Core 2 Extreme processor or even the soon to be launched Quad Core 2 Extreme QX9300 running at 2.53GHz, which we think will have a TDP of about 44W.

MS-9818 Specifications

• Supported processors: 45nm Socket P Intel Mobile Core 2 Duo/Celeron processors
• FSB: 1066/800/667 MHz
• Chipset: Intel GM45 North Bridge;Intel ICH9M-E South Bridge (with integrated TPM)
• Memory: 2x DDR2 800/667MHz SO-DIMM (up to 4GB max RAM)
• Graphics: Intel GMA X4500 Graphics with DirectX 10 support
• Display Outputs: VGA, DVI-D, HDMI, LVDS
  
• Audio: Realtek ALC888 5.1 Channel HD Audio; 6W Class-D Amplifier
• LAN: 2x Gigabit LAN ports (82567LM & 82574L)
• Storage:4x SATA II with RAID 0/1/5/10; 1x 44pin IDE
• Peripheral Connectivity: 4x USB 2.0 ports + 4x additional USB 2.0 headers; 1x RS-232/RS-422/RS-485 + 5x additional COM headers
  
• Expansion: 1x PCI; 1x Mini PCIe; 1x PCIe x1; 1x Compact Flash (underneath board)
• Size: 17cm x 17cm

MSI Motherboards at the Mini-ITX Store

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