ZOTAC IONITX-A-U Pro Reviews

If you've been looking for a motherboard for building the ultimate HTPC, this is the kit you'll want. The Zotac IONITX-A-U model offers a dual-core 1.6 GHz Atom N330 processor, Wi-Fi-N adapter, silent A/C power supply brick, and operates completely silent.

The simple sum up is that Ion remains suboptimal for use as a general purpose PC platform, it sucks at gaming and yet is pretty impressive as an alternative home cinema solution. However, we do have one further qualification to add and it concerns pricing. So there's no getting around it. At £100, this board would look like a real winner. At £175, it simply doesn't make sense. Whether it's possible to get close to £100 pounds given the component cost of Atom and Ion, however, only time will tell.

The IONITX-A-U Mini-ITX motherboard by Zotac proved to be an outstanding example of the small form factor as it performed admirably in every test, subjective and objective, and offered every feature necessary to form the center of an excellent HTPC.

Availability of the Zotac Ion A boards (with the dual-core Atom 330) is still pretty limited (Newegg only has the single-core version in stock) but I still stand by it being a good little motherboard.

Therefore, it doesn’t make sense to put your plans on hold waiting for the new ION2 platform that will combine a new-generation Atom processor from Pineview family with a discrete Nvidia GeForce GT218 graphics accelerator. The thing is that this CPU is just a little faster than Atom 230 or 330. And it means that nettops built on it won’t really expand the application field for this type of computer systems. Even a more powerful discrete graphics accelerator than the current GeForce 9300 won’t change anything, too. ION2 platform, just like ION, will only be positioned as a solution for simple home systems or multimedia centers. However, the current ION platform suits just perfectly for these systems already: we can’t complain about anything at this point.

ION based motherboards are great alternatives to the 945GSE based motherboards for the Atom platform with higher gaming performance, the ability to play back Blu-ray movies and more is a great start for an inexpensive computer system. The ZOTAC IONITX-A-U motherboard is available online for a grand total price of $184.99 meaning you can make a decent system for everyday tasks by adding memory, hard disks and an optical drive. Not everyone needs a HD 5970 video card with a 6-core Gulftown processor for their everyday use and the ION is a great fit for those wanting more than the Atom+945 chipset can offer.

The Zotac IONITX-A-U motherboard featuring the Atom 330 dual-core processor and NVIDIA ION graphics core is the first of what I believe will be many DIY-ready ION solutions. The question now is how well will they be adopted by an crowd used to higher performing parts but may not be used to sacrificing performance for power consumption and efficiency. While I would hesitate to call the ION platform as it stands today a budget gaming platform, there is a good argument to be made for it as a great starting HTPC with some basic gaming abilities.

In essence, all of these systems offer similar functionality because they are all based on the same platform. But the Zotac Ion motherboard is most appealing to us currently because it caters to the DIY crowd. Not only that, but the design of the IONITX-A model we tested in particular, offers some very interesting features, not the least of which is its DC power input.