Zotac's Ion: The World's First mini-ITX Ion Board
by Anand Lal Shimpi on May 12, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
3dsmax 9 - SPECapc 3dsmax CPU Rendering Test
Today's desktop processors are more than fast enough to do professional level 3D rendering at home. To look at performance under 3dsmax we ran the SPECapc 3dsmax 8 benchmark (only the CPU rendering tests) under 3dsmax 9 SP1. The results reported are the rendering composite scores:
Once again the Atom 330 is able to equal the performance of the Celeron 420 in our 3dsmax test thanks to its multi-threaded nature and the Atom 330's ability to work on four threads at once. Ion isn't any faster than a conventional Atom platform in this case either.
Blender 2.48a
Blender is an open source 3D modeling application. Our benchmark here simply times how long it takes to render a character that comes with the application.
Blender gains an advantage on Ion thanks to its faster GPU (Blender seems to be impacted by GPU as well as CPU speed). The advantage amounts to 7.5% but it's there nonetheless.
Cinebench R10
Created by the Cinema 4D folks we have Cinebench, a popular 3D rendering benchmark that gives us both single and multi-threaded 3D rendering results.
Our Cinebench results sum up the Atom vs. Celeron debate pretty well. When working on a single thread, the Celeron is significantly faster; in this case over 2x the speed of the Atom processor. Throw more threads at the CPUs and the Atom's threading advantage works in its favor, the 330 can deliver performance greater than a Celeron 420.
POV-Ray 3.73 beta 23 Ray Tracing Performance
POV-Ray is a popular, open-source raytracing application that also doubles as a great tool to measure CPU floating point performance.
I ran the SMP benchmark in beta 23 of POV-Ray 3.73. The numbers reported are the final score in pixels per second.
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ahmshaegar - Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - link
Greater power consumption = more heat. Where's that energy going to go?marshylucas - Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - link
You were faster, I was about to reply something similar.Thumbs up for the fanless design!
Jeffk464 - Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - link
Yes, but my laptop is very quiet, even with being severely limited on space for a heat sink and fan. If you had more rooms to put a large heat sink on it with a large low rpm fan, I think it would be near silent.trabpukcip - Friday, May 15, 2009 - link
A laptop does not make the best HTPC though. Connectivity is too limited and is generally inconvenient.GeorgeH - Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - link
"a single Gigabit Ethernet port (just like on the Intel boards)"Actually, only the D945GCLF2 has Gigabit Ethernet. The D945GCLF is stuck with 10/100, which is kind of a deal killer for me.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - link
Thanks for the correction :)Take care,
Anand
DrLudvig - Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - link
I'm confused here, most places it says that the hole ION thing is a 9400 chip, while some other places, like now here, says 9300?What is it really?
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - link
The 9300 and 9400 are the same chip, the difference is GPU clock. Take a look at the table on this page:http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=3432">http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=3432
The GF9300 on the Zotac board actually runs a bit slower than the stock GeForce 9300. It runs its core at 450MHz and its shaders at 1.1GHz instead of 450/1.2.
Take care,
Anand
Badkarma - Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - link
Anand,Can you please confirm/deny if the Zotac Ion boards support wake-on-usb? The Zotac 9300 mini-itx board does not support wake-on-usb and therefore powering the system on from standby from the MCE remote does not work without physical workarounds.
Thanks.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - link
I'm out of the office right now but I'll try it this weekend :) Drop me an email to remind me if you don't see something by the end of next week :)Take care,
Anand