Consider this the opening salvo in Nvidia’s mad charge to gain a foothold in the rapidly growing netbook space. Nvidia’s Ion platform, which pairs the company’s GeForce 9400 graphics processing unit with Intel’s 1.6-GHz Atom processor, looks to revolutionize the low-cost graphics market by enabling netbooks, nettops, and other types of value-price PCs to handle graphics-intensive games, full HD (1080p) video, and high-end operating systems such as Windows Vista Home Premium. Based on our tests of a small form factor desktop, Ion blows away Intel’s integrated chipset and graphics. However, we would want to see Ion inside a netbook and observe its impact on battery life before calling it the next big thing in bang-for-your-buck computing.
Nvidia Ion: The Basics
Powered by Nvidia’s 16-core GeForce 9400 (a version of the 9400M that Nvidia representative stated could be used in small-form PCs and nettops), Ion transforms low-cost Atom-powered systems into machines that offer five to ten times the gaming and video-transcoding performance over Intel’s integrated Atom GPU solution, according to Nvidia. This is achieved through the use of CUDA, Nvidia’s general-purpose parallel computing architecture that leverages the parallel computing engines in GPUs to solve complex problems swifter than a CPU.
Ion also enables true-fidelity 7.1 HD audio, which combined with the ability to play Blu-ray content (courtesy of PureHD Video technology), makes it a potential multimedia dynamo for low-cost PCs. Nvidia has yet to reveal OEMs that will use Ion in their builds, but says that the first wave of Ion-powered PCs should appear in the second quarter of 2009. Nevertheless, our test build shows that the Ion platform holds much promise.
Reference PC Design
Our 1.4-pound test unit was Nvidia’s Ion Reference PC, a small 5.6 x 4.3 x 1.5-inch box that looked very much like an early build of a nettop. There’s a thermal vent carved into the top of the box in the shape of Nvidia’s “eye” logo, plus extra vents on the side of the unit to help keep it cool. Scattered about the front and back of the Ion box are seven USB 2.0 ports, HDMI, VGA, DisplayPort, and dual-link DVI (which was disabled in this build, but will be fully functional when Nvidia updates Ion’s BIOS). The multitude of connection options came in very handy as we were able to add a keyboard, mouse, and attach the system to a 32-inch Samsung monitor (with a native resolution of 1920 x 1080) to get the full PC experience.
Smooth Performance
In term of performance, Ion proved to run quite smooth. Our Reference PC’s engine was composed of a 1.6-GHz Intel Atom N230 processor, which is a nettop version of the familiar N270 that utilizes the same 512K cache and 533-MHz frontside bus, but adds a higher 4-watt power requirement. In conjunction with 2GB of RAM, a 7,200-rpm, 200GB Seagate Momentus hard drive, and Windows Vista Enterprise, the system notched a PCMark Vantage score of 1,306, which was more than 200 points higher than the Gigabyte M912, the only other netbook to run the benchmark successfully. Compared against ultraportables, another lightweight class of notebook, Ion’s score was (predictably) low: it was more than 1,200 points lower than those full-fledged systems.
Still, we were able to stream content from Hulu.com and work within multiple windows at once without consequence. The Reference PC took 1 minute and 12 seconds to boot into the operating system (which was 15 seconds more than the netbook average), and transferred a 4.97GB folder of mixed media at a rate of 11.8 MBps. That’s slightly lower than the netbook average (13.4 MBps), but nearly twice that of the ASUS Eee Box nettop (7.7 MBps).
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