Zotac ZBOX HD-ID11 Review: Next Gen ION is Better & Worse than ION1
by Anand Lal Shimpi on May 6, 2010 3:51 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- Next Generation ION
- HD-ID11
- ZOTAC
- NVIDIA
H.264 Decode Acceleration
Of course the whole reason you opt for a NG-ION (or ION) box is because you want to watch high definition content. The GT218 GPU at the heart of the NG-ION supports full hardware decode acceleration of all H.264 content. You can watch Blu-ray or even ripped BD content using something like Media Player Classic Home Cinema.
Watching The Dark Knight in MPC-HC results in ~12% CPU utilization on the Atom D510 with NG-ION
My personal favorite thing to do with these ION boxes is to load XBMC and use them to stream content to the TVs in my house. You get a great UI, the ability to play virtually everything over the network and there’s even an iPhone app to act as a WiFi remote control for the box (which is necessary given that Zotac doesn't include an IR port). You don’t get TrueHD/DTS-HD MA bitstreaming support, but you can send 8-channel LPCM audio over HDMI.
XBMC in action on the NG ION
The NG-ION works in both capacities. Playing individual H.264 content under Windows 7 was fully hardware accelerated. Getting the XBMC Live image to work took some effort. While it'll install to the system just fine, getting audio working requires an update to the alsa driver that comes on the image as well as a bit of tinkering. After installing the XBMC Live 9.11 CD image to the drive, I followed these instructions to update the Alsa Driver with one slight change to the process:
1. download the script and save it somewhere
2. cd <your-download-dir>
3. tar xvf AlsaUpgrade-1.0.22.1-2.tar
4. sudo ./AlsaUpgrade-1.0.22.1-2.sh -d
5. sudo ./AlsaUpgrade-1.0.22.1-2.sh -s
6. sudo ./AlsaUpgrade-1.0.22.1-2.sh -c
7. sudo ./AlsaUpgrade-1.0.22.1-2.sh -i
8. sudo shutdown -r 0
For me, step #5 was critical in getting the process to work. Afterwards, I had to download and apply the patch mentioned here to get the GT218 GPU recognized. Finally I followed the last two steps made in this post and got sound working in XBMC.
I suspect that once we start seeing NG-ION boxes ship in the coming weeks some kind souls will make XBMC Live discs specifically for those machines so you'll be able to avoid this process.
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Rayb - Thursday, May 6, 2010 - link
I'll go with the ION1, since the flash 10.1 patch everything else became a non issue.QChronoD - Thursday, May 6, 2010 - link
Are there any tiny systems like this out there which have something faster than an Atom that use the ION chipset?sprockkets - Thursday, May 6, 2010 - link
Yes, but only if you want an LGA775 processor. It uses the 9300/9400 chipset, which is basically the same thing.Works great. Except I really, really want fanless.
icrf - Friday, May 7, 2010 - link
I've got a Wolfdale HTPC now with one of the Zotac NV9300 Micro-ATX boards, and it works, but it's noisy. The lack of wake-on-USB from S3 and the lack of fan control access from Windows pissed me off about the board enough I'll probably avoid Zotac boards for the foreseeable future. I can live without the wake on USB from S3, but not being able to dynamically control fan speeds is just terrible. Every motherboard I've bought for more than the last five years have had that. I didn't even think to look for it.More than a little OT, but for me, the big competition for this is something like the Boxee Box, which I haven't heard a peep about since CES. Anyone know any more details about it? I thought it was originally slated for 1H10 but I've seen a bare 2010 quoted, too. I'd probably pick one of those up just to see how well it'd work. I'd be on the pre-order list if I knew I could get XBMC running on it. I've got Boxee, XBMC, and Hulu installed on my HTPC now and can flip between them. Boxee is the one run least often because the other two do what they do much better.
hpmoon - Friday, May 7, 2010 - link
My suspicion about the Boxee Box delay is quite simply that the media assholes are standing at the ready (and have scared Boxee to this effect) for suing them with full force as soon as the hardware hits the market. They must believe (or at least their questionably schooled lawyers must believe) that the legal ramifications suddenly change when it's not just a PC running the Boxee software and thus framing Firefox Web site visits anymore, but an actual non-PC device doing something very different without full-blown Firefox PC functionality.Of course, if this were the backstory, no one would tell you this.
icrf - Friday, May 7, 2010 - link
The experience of running Hulu through Boxee is bad enough I'm not sure I'd worry about it too much. You can play/pause it, but that's it. Seeking forward or backwards isn't supported. If the stream dies halfway through and you need to restart, or you have to pause it for a long time and the connection times out, or if you just want to repeat what someone said, you're SOL.If I'm wrong and some of this got fixed, someone holler, but Boxee seemed more about the social aspect than anything else. You can get these little clip videos from all over the internet, publicize what you're watching and what you like or don't, etc.
ClagMaster - Thursday, May 6, 2010 - link
I wonder if the memory controllers on board the AMD and Intel CPUs are as optimized as those found on the P965, P35 and P45 ?The P965/G965 has a wonderful memory controller that was far more efficient than that on the AMD 64.
How can one evaluate this ?
aj28 - Thursday, May 6, 2010 - link
A bit off topic, but I think it's worth pointing out that AMD64 (754/939) was a DDR controller, while Intel's P965 was a DDR2 controller. I miss the old nForce controllers, which were some of the more feature-rich, error-free (at least in my experience) chipsets out there. It's a shame that Intel has designed their new platform the way they have...Calin - Friday, May 7, 2010 - link
NVidia chipsets had that issue with the disk controller (the possibility to totally trash the content of your hard drive). Other than that, they were for quite a time the high point in chipsets. The only "hotter" chipset I remember was the "BX-100" variant (Intel's 66MHz 440BX chipset, made to run with the Pentium !!! processors on a front side bus of 100MHz).rnjeezy - Thursday, May 6, 2010 - link
yes, i know there's a point in having it, but it's probably good to have another m.b which removes it, and then add one more lane to the gfx