Zotac's Ion: The World's First mini-ITX Ion Board

DivX 8.5.3 with Xmpeg 5.0.3

Our DivX test is the same DivX / XMpeg 5.03 test we've run for the past few years now, the 1080p source file is encoded using the unconstrained DivX profile, quality/performance is set balanced at 5 and enhanced multithreading is enabled:

The DivX encoding performance of the Atom 330 is a bit behind that of the Celeron 420, but somewhat respectable thanks to its ability to work on four threads at once. The Atom 230 is noticeably slower however.

x264 HD Video Encoding Performance

Graysky's x264 HD test uses the publicly available x264 codec (open source alternative to H.264) to encode a 4Mbps 720p MPEG-2 source. The focus here is on quality rather than speed, thus the benchmark uses a 2-pass encode and reports the average frame rate in each pass.

Under the x264 encoding test Intel's Atom 330 is actually faster than both single core Celerons. The single core version is much slower and there's no real performance advantage afforded by the Ion.

Windows Media Encoder 9 x64 Advanced Profile

In order to be codec agnostic we've got a Windows Media Encoder benchmark looking at the same sort of thing we've been doing in the DivX and x264 tests, but using WME instead.

Our encoding results are echoed in Windows Media Encoder 9.