Zotac NVIDIA Ion Motherboard: SFF Goodness

Name: Zotac NVIDIA Ion Motherboard: SFF Goodness - Page 5
Brand: Zotac

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, May 12, 2009, 09:00 AM EDT

We began our benchmark testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA XII, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran four of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA 2009 test suite with the Zotac Ion motherboard (CPU Arithmetic, CPU Multimedia, Memory Bandwidth, and the Disk Storage tests). All of the scores reported below were taken with the board's integratead N330 Atom processor running at its default clock speed of 1.6GHz, with 2GB of DDR2-800 system memory, and HyperThreading enabled.

Preliminary Testing with SiSoft SANDRA 2009

Synthetic Benchmarks

The Zotac Ion motherboard performed almost identically to NVIDIA's reference Ion platform in our SiSoft SANDRA tests. It did fall a bit short of the reference platform in the memory bandwidth tests, but that was to be expected--the reference platform was equipped with faster DDR3 memory, the Zotac board used DDR2. The Zotac board pulled way out in front in the storage benchmarks, but that was only because we used a desktop hard drive for these tests.

Tags: Nvidia, graphics, Zotac, Atom, Motherboard

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com