Overclocking

The ASRock ION 330HT-BD offers the ability to overclock both the GPU and the CPU in the BIOS, much like the mainstream ATX boards out there. The big difference seems to be, that ASRock has actually pre-programmed the BIOS to give you various degrees of overclockablity. While the CPU runs at a default 1.6 GHz, you are able to raise it to 2.1 GHz by selecting the speed in the EZ overclocking profile in the BIOS. Doing so automatically raises the CPU voltage to 1.315 V. At this setting the fans seemed a tad bit louder, but everything ran stable. You may also push the system further, by manually overclocking the FSB, but as you will see in the graphs below, the temperature at 2.1 GHz is quite high already. The fact that ASRock offers such a simple way to raise the CPU speed by around 30% with a few key presses is excellent.

As for the GPU overclocking, there are no set profiles, so you need to work your way up. I set the Core from 450 to 500 MHz and the Shaders from 1100 to 1200 MHz. You may be able to get more out of it, but we simply want to show you that it is possible with the ION 330HT-BD.

Performance

Before we dive into the performance benchmarks, I had to come up with a reasonable set of tests to highlight the main selling points of such a system. The ION platform can utilize an Atom CPU along with the GeForce 9400 IGP on the ION chipset to display full HD content, while keeping power consumption to a mininum. Other tasks like browsing and office work would be nothing new for small form factor PCs as that has been possible with older mini-ITX generations already. Even the new all in one Intel Atom solution, which holds the CPU, GPU and chipset in a single package cannot manage 1080p output yet as preliminary tests have shown, so ION remains the only one out there for mini-ITX solutions in combination with Atom. This brings us to the second aspect: power consumption. This is another major selling point and we wanted to see how much the entire system draws in standby, idle, load and watching a full HD movie in form of a WMV HD file and the "Batman: Dark Knight" BluRay . Some of you may also use the ION as a small gaming rig, planning to play some classic 3D based games on your big screen TV, that is the reason we ran 3DMark06, giving you a comparison number. Finally we also ran PCMark05 for some comparable results.

Power Consumption

The power consumption in standby equals that of the Zotac MAG Ion. This is simply due to the fact that both systems use nearly identical 65W power bricks. But both idle and load power draws are less with the ASRock ION 330HT-BD, even though the difference is small. When overclocking the system to 2.1 GHz, we see a noticeable increase in both these states


The power draw when watching a WMV HD file with 1080p resolution differs from that while watching the Batman: Dark Knight DVD. We used PowerDVD9 to display at what points the movie managed to rack up a large video bitrate. It often surpasses 40 MBits/s, which is much more than the 8 MBit/s of the full HD video file.

CPU Utilization & Temperature

CPU utilization during both the playback of the 1080p video file as well as the most demanding times during the BluRay were noted. As you can see, the Atom CPU does have to do quite some work, but you should even be able to do a few other things while watching either type of movie.


Even though the ASRock ION 330HT-BD utilizes two small aluminum heatsinks with a pair of small fans to cool the system, it manages to keep rather cool during the review. There is a large temperature difference between the CPU and GPU. This is simply due to the fact that the smaller CPU fan is directly attached to the heatsink, while the larger fan besides the GPU cooler is attached to the rear of the chassis and not the heatsink. During the tests in an overclocked state, the GPU even manages to crack the 70°C mark, which is high but not dangerous.

3DMark06

We no longer have the Zotac ION, as we had to return it after our review, so we cannot try to overclock the MAG to give you comparison numbers. Both systems utilize the same ION plattform, thus the 3DMark06 score should be nearly identical. When overclocking both the CPU and the GPU we manage an additional 200 points in this benchmark. This may not seem like a lot, but is quite a jump of around 15%.

PCMark05

Noise Level

The ASRock ION 330HT-BD is extremely quiet during normal operations. Much so in comparison with the Zotac MAG Ion. While that is certainly a positive aspect, the type of noise the unit emits is much worse. Due to the tiny fans inside the unit, there is a subtle high pitch whine. So while it is quiet, this whine becomes really bothersome rather quickly. It would have been nice to see a more elaborate cooling solution, with heatpipes perhaps, to allow for cooling with a single large fan instead. Another option would be to simply create an isolated air tunnel, by placing a plastic shrout over both heatsinks and allowing the rear fan to just blow that hot air out of the system.