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Zotac ION-ITX-A Motherboard Review
May 12, 2009

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 ION-ITX Atom Mini-ITX Board Unboxing and Salivating
May 04, 2009

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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