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
Gaming Performance: Better and Worse than ION1
Here’s where things get a little iffy. The ION2 GPU is located behind a single PCIe 1.0 lane, that’s a maximum of 250MB/s of bandwidth in either direction. The original ION had a full x16 connection to the chipset. There are going to be certain situations where the next generation ION platform is actually slower than its predecessor. In games that are more compute bound we should see the next generation ION platform win out. In those that are CPU bound, we may see the opposite.
In either case you can actually play some games, at very low image quality settings on the next generation ION, which is something you simply can’t do on the base Pine Trail platform:
When there is an advantage, we saw anywhere from a 0 - 30% increase in GPU performance over the original ION. However when it loses, the older ION is about 5 - 10% faster.
| 3D Gaming Performance: NG-ION vs. ION | ||||
| Low Quality Settings | Zotac ZBOX HD-ID11 (NG-ION) | Zotac ZBOX HD-ND02 (ION1) | ||
| Left 4 Dead (1024 x 768) | 27.8 fps | 22.9 fps | ||
| World of Warcraft (Good Quality - 800 x 600) | 11.8 fps | 11.2 fps | ||
| DiRT2 (800 x 600) | 17.5 fps | 18.5 fps | ||
| BioShock 2 (800 x 600) | 18.6 fps | 16.7 fps | ||
| Dragon Age Origins (800 x 600) | 23.3 fps | 17.8 fps | ||
NVIDIA tells us that it’s up to the motherboard manufacturer to determine how to allocate the PCIe lanes coming off the NM10 Express chipset. However it’s hard to see a scenario where a company would sacrifice things like WiFi or Gigabit Ethernet for better gaming performance.
GPU Compute Performance: Still Slightly Slower than ION1
I ran a quick Badaboom encode converting a rip of the Weeds season 2 Blu-ray to an iPhone optimized format. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, Badaboom is a CUDA app that uses a supported NVIDIA GPU to do all video encoding. If you’re not going for maximum image quality and just want a quick way of getting your video transcoded to a portable device, Badaboom is great.
Despite the increase in GPU and shader clock, the anemic x1 interface to the NG-ION GPU actually dropped performance compared to ION1. This is still something you can’t do with the base Pine Trail system, but it’s not exactly an upgrade over the original ION.
| CUDA Performance: NG-ION vs. ION | ||||
| Zotac ZBOX HD-ID11 (NG-ION) | Zotac ZBOX HD-ND02 (ION1) | |||
| Badaboom 1080p H.264 to iPhone Conversion | 15.2 fps | 15.4 fps | ||
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Shadowmaster625 - Friday, May 7, 2010 - link
Why would intel only give 4 pci express lanes? That's just retarded. Why would NVidia even mess with this atom? Why not just use the old atom? Its the same damn thing. Just do a LTB on the old atom. Nvidia should go BK for doing stupid crap like this.hpmoon - Friday, May 7, 2010 - link
Wow. So while we appreciate that Zotac sent an early review unit, they should have paid attention when most of us observed that it would be rather offensive to jack up the price a second time merely by gauging enthusiast interest. $209 --> $239 --> $259 = pissed off customers. Now that the reviews are eh, we're done with you. And it's gonna hit you hard when every reviewer bemoans how $260 is just the beginning, with $100 at a minimum in additional expense for the RAM and hard drive. For truth-in-advertising, let's get real: The HD-ID11 is just under $400.Moving along.
hemantha - Sunday, May 9, 2010 - link
From the power consumption page - "The XBMC Live image I installed doesn't seem to let the Atom cores underclock themselves to 600MHz". I think D510 doesn't support EIST. I believe only Atom Nxxx do. So unless motherboard supports undervolting, I don't think these can be made to run at lower clock speeds.Nathelion - Monday, May 10, 2010 - link
Is there any information on if/when a Nano-Ion combo will be out? Atom really isn't fast enough to catch my eye, and (C)ULV is too expersive.sucram03 - Tuesday, May 11, 2010 - link
Did you really just mention VIA? That's scary @_@Really, the whole fact that is unless costs are driven down, users are almost better off getting a cheap AMD Vision-powered laptop for approximately the same price. You can find some of those laptops on sale for <$450 and have Athlon II X2 M300 CPUs and Radeon HD 4200's, which are both good enough to accelerate any videos thanks to the new release of the 10.4 Catalyst version (H.264 decoding up to L5.1). And most have HDMI ports, bluetooth, 802.11n, the list goes on...
Add to that the general flexibility and portability of having a laptop (i.e. having a built-in display right there with the computer, having a battery), and although you will have higher energy usage, it is NOT going to be a major concern for most households when all you do is boot it up for playback.
Broadcom's chipset is interesting, but still is only able to decode up to L4.1 H.264 if I remember correctly. Nvidia's chipsets would be the BEST to use to enable CUDA decoding and remove pretty much all limitations on accelerating any kind of video, but if you're going to have to pay the same as what you could buy a laptop for (or more), then what's the use? IMHO, AMD appears to have positioned themselves in the middle if we're talking about the HTPC/movie playback department for a budget system. Cost, features, benefits all seem to be pointing to them for the best benefit possible.
CereKong - Monday, May 10, 2010 - link
Quote:While manufacturers can use all four PCIe 1.0 lanes coming off Intel’s NM10 Express chipset, most have chosen to use just one leaving the remaining lanes for things like WiFi. A single PCIe 1.0 lane can only provide 250MB/s of bandwidth in either direction, hardly enough for a modern GPU. It’s because of this limitation that the next-generation ION GPU could actually perform slower than the first ION.
Thus which manufacturers do provide motherboards with multiple lanes for the GPU - and if possible are there any differences performance wise?
SnazzyS - Thursday, May 13, 2010 - link
NewEgg sold out very quickly. Looks like Logic Supply has some in stock: http://www.logicsupply.com/products/zbox_hd_id11idokibovito - Friday, May 14, 2010 - link
Not quite sure there but I've been keeping my eyes on the Acer Revo 3610 which seems to basically be the same thing as this _without_ the cooling fan! Looking at benchmarks the new CPU is 5-10% faster (tops) and the GPU is not much faster either (because of the PCIe 1x lane). In some benchmarks both CPU and GPU are actually slower than ION1 (which has a Geforce 9400M instead of a GT218.I would prefer the new generation, even if it's just a spit faster (think VPDAU and VP3 vs. VP4). But that fan and seemingly no real life performance benefit keeps me looking back on the Revo, which is cheaper and a hardware that is known to work with XBMC and Linux without dirty patches and evening prayers.
I can't see why this "next-gen" thing is better or even more future proof, however I would like to. Anyone?
Thanks
coutch - Monday, May 24, 2010 - link
any word if the drivers released today (BETA 256) address the flash performance issue ?Jackie78 - Wednesday, July 28, 2010 - link
Which version of XBMC did you use, since I guess they do not officially support DXVA accelerated video.