Two New Ions: ASUS AT3N7A-I and ASRock Ion 330

The Ion Performance Showdown

All of the benchmarks on the previous page were run under Windows Vista, but I actually spent most of my time using these Ions under Windows 7. As a quick sanity check I compared all three using PCMark Vantage to see if there were any performance differences at all. All three systems used the same 2 x 2GB DDR2-800 sticks, a 120GB Super Talent UltraDrive GX SSD and the same install of Windows 7 x64. We used NVIDIA's 15.41 chipset drivers, 190.62 GPU drivers and 10.000.55 HDMI drivers.

With the same CPU, same graphics and after I swapped in the same SSD into all three builds, the performance is obviously: the same. If we’re going to separate these things it’s going to be along some other vector.

I measured how long each of these machines took to boot:

The ASUS was the quickest, although only the Zotac was noticeably slower here. Disabling ASUS' Express Gate pre-boot environment is absolutely necessary for a fast boot time. Before I disabled EG the board spent around 25 seconds POSTing before it started to launch Windows.