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. Lastly we also ran PCMark05 for some comparable results.

Power Consumption

As mentioned before, power consumption is a big selling point. The Zotac MAG draws a mere 0.5 W when in standby, which can be attributed to the small 65W power brick, while the ATX power supply of the Zotac 9300 ITX weighs in at a very respectable 1.5 W. I was surprised to see, that the 150 W power brick of the Origen AE requires 7.6 W for standby. To give you an idea about overall costs, let's take the load power consumption of around 35 W. If you were to leave the Zotac MAG on 24/7 for the entire year, running 3DMark06 in an endless loop, you will have to pay around 36-40€s extra on your power bill if you were to live in Austria.

1080P CPU Utilization

To test the CPU utilization of the Zotac MAG and the ION platform in general, we grabbed the "Coral Reef Adventure" 1080P WMV HD file from the Microsoft Showcase website. It has a video bitrate of around 8 MBit/s. The Zotac MAG and the ION F both required around one third of the CPU power under the hood, while the 9300 based Celeron 440 was pushed to just under 60%. Power consumption when watching this video was around 30 W for the ION platforms, while the 9300 required well over 50 W.


During the reviewing process I noticed, that the air coming out of the ceiling vent was extremely warm. Turns out that the unit runs quite hot during normal use. CPUIDs HWMonitor was used to read out the temperatures of both the CPU and the GPU. For the ION-F we got almost identical temperatures for both areas, as they are both located under the same large heatsink, being cooled by a single fan. The Zotac MAG is not extremely loud, but quite audible. The cooling system within the unit spins up all the way during the first few seconds of the booting process and at no time during reviewing did we reach that noise level. We could set the fan to full throttle in the BIOS to lower these temperatures, which will increase the noise level considerably. That said, with the default configuration, we did hit fairly high temperatures, but at not time did the Zotac MAG become unstable or crashed during testing.

PCMark05