When we reviewed Zotac's ZBOX HD-ID11 we noted that the upgrade to the Next-Generation ION didn't feel like much of an upgrade. Performance improved in some cases, but power consumption got worse and in 3D games and Flash playback performance actually dropped. The latter was a particular problem because many want to buy these NG-ION nettops for use as streaming content devices.

NVIDIA recently gave us a driver to improve the Flash playback situation on NG-ION platforms and we put it through the paces. While it doesn't fix everything, there's at least light at the end of this tunnel. Read on for the story.

The nForce 2 was one of the best chipsets to come out of NVIDIA. It was NVIDIA’s second attempt at a desktop chipset yet it cemented NVIDIA’s position as a leading provider of core logic in the market. Oh how much has changed since then.

Most of what made a chipset worthwhile is now integrated into the CPU. It used to be memory controller optimizations that kept chipsets afloat, but that’s no longer the case as all x86 processors now ship with an integrated memory controller. The performance differences between chipsets disappeared and all that was left was testing, validation and drivers, also known as the boring, expensive and time consuming aspects of chipset development.

NVIDIA has mostly abandoned the chipset business, focusing on opportunistic wins where possible. The most obvious example is with ION, its chipset/GPU for Atom based systems.

Last year we played with a number of ION systems and motherboards and were generally impressed. The platform made for a powerful little HTPC. Today we’re able to bring you a hands on performance preview of the first Next Generation ION box we’ve laid our hands on: the Zotac ZBOX HD-ID11.

That's Zotac's HD-ID11-U, a nettop based on the dual-core Atom D510 and NVIDIA's 16 core next-gen ION with 512MB DDR3 frame buffer. The system shipped entirely barebones so we'll be suiting it up and running whatever preliminary tests we can on it over the weekend. As I mentioned earlier, drivers aren't final so don't expect a full rundown anytime soon.

The system sports 6 USB ports, HDMI & DVI out, eSATA, Ethernet, optical audio out, headphone/mic jacks and a SD card reader. Internally you've got one 2.5" bay for a SATA HDD (or SSD) and a single SO-DIMM slot for DDR2.

If you want a closer look at the system head over to our pics in the Gallery.