|  | September 05, 2017
Choosing the right DC-DC PSU August 27, 2015
AMD's Project Quantum August 13, 2015
The Redstone PC is the ultimate Mini-ITX Minecraft Machine October 09, 2014
The "Restomod TV" April 09, 2013
Installing NAS4Free February 28, 2013
Building an XBMC 12 Home Theatre PC January 25, 2011
XBMC Guide updated to version 10.0 August 06, 2010
Building a Green PC February 15, 2010
Building an ION powered HTPC with XBMC October 10, 2008
The "Cambridge Autonomous Underwater Vehicle 2008" |
| | | | September 12, 2008
"Florian", the DVD burning robot September 05, 2008
The "i-EPIA" May 22, 2008
The "GTA-PC" April 14, 2007
The "Digg" Case January 19, 2007
The "ITX-Laptop" December 07, 2006
The "Tortoise Beetle" October 02, 2006
The "DOS Head Unit" August 31, 2006
The "Janus Project" August 05, 2006
The "Leela PC" June 26, 2006
Nano-ITX in a Football May 17, 2006
The "EPIA Alloy Mod" April 11, 2006
Neatorama's Collection of Case Mods February 18, 2006
The "Rundfunker" October 24, 2005
The "ITX TV" October 06, 2005
The K'nex-ITX August 05, 2005
The "Waffle Iron PC" July 21, 2005
The "Supra-Server" July 18, 2005
The "Mega-ITX" July 07, 2005
The "Encyclomedia" May 25, 2005
The "Accordion ITX" |
| | | | May 16, 2005
The "FileServerRouterSwitch" May 15, 2005
The "Mini Falcon" May 13, 2005
The "Bender PC" May 11, 2005
The "BBC ITX B" May 10, 2005
The "Frame" April 20, 2005
The "Jeannie" March 09, 2005
The "Cool Cube" January 30, 2005
First Nano-ITX Project? January 17, 2005
The "iGrill" January 15, 2005
The "Gumball PC" December 15, 2004
The "Deco Box" December 03, 2004
The "TERA-ITX" October 06, 2004
The "Coealacanth-PC" September 17, 2004
The "Gramaphone-ITX-HD" August 26, 2004
The "C1541 Disk Drive ITX" August 25, 2004
The "SEGA-ITX" August 13, 2004
The "Quiet Cubid" August 06, 2004
The "BMWPC" July 14, 2004
The "Moo Cow Moo" July 02, 2004
The "Mini Mesh Box" Full alphabetical archive on right hand side of page... |
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Zotac ION-ITX-A Review
Video Playback
We have collected a number of test files over the years representing different classes of video encoded in increasingly high bandwidth ways, from MPEG1 (VCD) through MPEG2 (DVD) and MPEG4 (DivX) to H264 720p and 1080p files. All but the lowliest current Mini-ITX boards can handle MPEG4, but we expect nothing less than full playback of anything we can throw at it from the ION - as it has CUDA support... PureVideo™ HD and CUDA™ support
NVIDIA PureVideo™ HD provides hardware acceleration for decoding the compression routines used on both Blu-ray and HD DVD movies: H.264, VC-1, and MPEG-2.
NVIDIA CUDA™ is a framework that enables programmers to write software that exploits the parallel processing power of GPUs.
The ION Chipset supports both of these technologies, giving two ways to accelerate video. We used a tried and tested combination of ffdshow and the CoreAVC 1.9.5 codec to enable CUDA video acceleration on both boards, and were able to accelerate our videos from within Vista Media Center without any problems.
Given more time with our review sample we suspect VDPAU should be possible under Linux using (for example) Mplayer, VLC or MythTV.
Due to these time constraints we did not fit a Blu-Ray drive to test PureVideo HD acceleration, but have no reason to suspect it wouldn't function perfectly. We'll update this review in a few weeks when we do.
The ION-ITX-A was able to playback both local files and files played from a NAS over a local network. Our test files varied between standard DivX, 1280 x 720 and 1920 x 1080p H264 files. Both boards would have struggled with their 1080p files without the CUDA support.
We estimated CPU load using the task manager, so our figures are a little subjective. We know from our temperature measurements that the ION barely gets warm whilst doing this which makes it all the more impressive.
Audio Performance
Both the TOSLINK and RCA S/PDIF digital audio outputs worked perfectly through our amplifier. That's good enough for us.
Other ION Chipset Features
Some other things we didn't have time to test fully: The ION Chipset supports PhysX™ Physics acceleration as well as nView™ multiple display support for up to 2 monitors, and MediaShield™ giving RAID 0, 1 and 0+1. This board has undiscovered depths.
But can it playback 1080p?
Yes it can.
Final Thoughts -->
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