Customer Reviews

Zotac IONITX-A-U Atom N330 Dual Core 90-Watt PSU WiFi ITX Intel Motherboard

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I've been waiting for this motherboard for a long time; finally a MythTV frontend which can quietly play high definition video and sip electricity while doing so. And one with so many ports on the back: HDMI, DVI and VGA for video; TOSLink Coax, SPDIF optical, HDMI and analog for audio. Gigabit Ethernet. Plenty of USB ports and one eSATA port. A feast of port flexibility.

While people have been talking about the Wake on USB function of recent revisions of this board; I find the Wake on LAN BIOS option more interesting. You can get an iPhone or other smartphone app which can wake the device via WiFi, making it easy to keep the computer in a low power state and only pulling Watts when needed.

My setup:
I've installed the 64-bit version of Mythbuntu 9.10 on a 60 GB Seagate Momentus laptop drive I had lying around.
2GB of PNY brand RAM allow me to allocate half a GB to the video card (BIOS setting); recommended for maximum video performance.
And a small Mini-ITX case complete the very simple hardware assembly.
I also installed XBMC, and that seems responsive and beautiful.
I first used the VGA connector for video, and the coax port for digital audio, but in the end, I ended up using an HDMI switch and getting both audio and video over that port which worked well.

I removed the included WiFi card, as I will be using hard wired Ethernet and would prefer to not include whatever minor Wattage the little card draws in standby.

I would not run this board fanless. I played a 1080i MPEG2 over the air video on it without a case and my infrared thermometer read the GPU temperature at 60°C, which is fairly toasty. Still it should get by with minimal slow fans. There are a large number of suggestions on the Internet to lower the voltage of the included fan via the purchase of a third party fan controller. I was unable to use Linux utilities to monitor the temperature, but the NVDIA control panel does give the temperature of the GPU: when playing 720p video with a fan on, the GPU was at 49°C, which is not bad. When using VDPAU decoding in the GPU, the CPU is showing only about 15% utilization regardless of content.

I measured the electrical usage of the system as a whole with a Kill-A-Watt. Hibernate: 2W, Sleep: 3W, Idle: 25W, playing DVD image: 26W, playing 720p MPEG2 video: 28W, playing 1080i MPEG2 video: 31W.

I have not tried Flash 10.1 yet, but have hopes the hardware acceleration will be there for watching Hulu videos. Also, have not tried Hulu desktop yet.

[Update: Because I was given a comparably spec'd Zotac MAG Intel Atom N330, NVIDIA ION, 2 GB DDR2, 160 GB HD, eSATA, HDMI HD-ND01-U Mini PC - No OS as a HTPC, I repurposed this motherboard in a larger case, MI-008 Tower Black P4 Chassis with 250W Itx Psu+sata Power Supply, as a home server, a function for which it is adequate given a case with room for an optical drive and a large desktop hard drive. With the limitation that the power supply limits you to 3 SATA internal devices;any further storage expansion will have to be done via the one remaining eSATA connector. Also, it would be nice to have a PCI slot of some sort (and no the mini-PCIe slot does not count as it is reputed to only work with the included wireless card). Still even with two fans keeping the case cool, it makes for a reasonably quiet and energy efficient server, certainly more cost efficient than the noisy Pentium 4 desktop it is replacing. I would not have bought this for a server and would have gone with a cheaper board without a power supply. As it is, I had to remove and shelve an unused power supply out of the new case. The new server is now busy recording TV shows (via networked HDHomerun tuners), serving files, hosting a Subversion server, and occasionally serving as a desktop computer when I find myself in the laundry room.
]

this board is AWESOME! just got it after waiting for a month and a half for amazon to stock it, and it was definately worth the wait. I am running XBMC (XBMC.org) on it, the live version (9.04.1) and it plays every 720 and 1080p MKV file i can throw at it, using VDPAU acceleration. If you want a low power, low cost media center, definately grab this board!

System specs:

Zotac ION-A-U
4GB Patriot PC6400 ram
40GB Fujitsu 5400rpm laptop drive (for OS)
Universal M350 case
XBMC Live 9.04.1

This is truly a great board. It has all the features you want in a HTPC board and then some. Admittedly I'm running Windows, but it does "just work" as far as all the connections go. And full screening a blu-ray video with the right software is flawless. I don't use any fans and heat is not a problem.

Wake on USB is great as well. When you put this guy to sleep it goes all the way down, no sound no lights. Then your wireless usb mouse or keyboard wakes it right up. Yay.

Only thing I really wanted that isn't perfect is full screen flash video, such as Hulu. These services are heavy on the CPU, and at 720p resolution for the desktop and Hulu set to a 420p video, the CPU maxes out and the video is a bit choppy. Not quite watchable actually. So I usually have to drop Hulu to 360p. Or you could lower the desktop resolution down when watching Hulu.

That's the only complaint. Overall a really really great HTPC board.

Got 4 gigs of RAM and a WD 1TB Caviar Green.

This is a great board for an HTPC. I coupled it with a 1 tb drive and a nice jetway JC-300 mini-itx tower and 4 gb of memory. Loaded up Ubuntu 9.04 and installed XBMC and Boxee. All told about $350 in total.

With VDPAU through the NVIDIA driver I'm streaming HD 1040p to my t.v. barely breaking 30% of cpu. Runs cool with only one fan, and seems to draw about 30 watts streaming to the t.v. and virtually nothing in hibernate or off, 2 watts in sleep mode. It wakes on usb now, so you can wake it up with media pc remote control.

There's nothing not to like about this board. It would work as a low-power desktop. Enough power for officeware and browsing. Not enough video power to play 3d games, even of a few years vintage (enemy territory), but the video is plenty powerful enough for hdtv streaming.

It could be a bit cheaper and there are some lower cost alternatives for building low power htpc's, but I'm not complaining. It's working flawlessly.

This is a fantastic motherboard that does nearly everything. 90w power means you don't have to feel guilty about leaving it on all night. Dual Atom processors and onboard dedicated graphics lets this even play games reasonably. It works fine with Windows 7, Guild Wars, Left4Dead, even the new Aion plays reasonably on low settings. I currently have 2 1TB HDs and a DVD burner hooked up to it, all work fine. Wireless works fine though I haven't tested at range.

To get 720p/1080p video to run correctly (by utilizing the onboard nvidia video card), it takes the right apps and some tweaking. The hardest part about this board is finding a case that makes sense. I ended up buying a small case and removing the power supply. It's running at reasonable temps with no fans.

This board is all you need to setup a nice and clean HTPC.

I set mine up with an Intel 80GB SDD, 4GB Corsair PRO and Win XP Home,... will get Win 7 soon.
Run very smooth on a 40" Sony LCD, all the HD run very clean. Boot up less then 20 sec.
With this setup, I can afford to leave it up all night long.


Pros:

Use less "gas"
Come with power supply
DUAL CORE N330 ION
Built in HDMI
Built in 9400 Nivida
Built in Wi-Fi
Fan-less, noiseless
Play all the HD videos


Cons:

High price,..should start out at $130-$150 not $189.
Run a little hot without fan <70 C
Don't come with power switch.... j/k.

I was skeptical that this could possibly serve as an HD HTPC but I clearly was proven wrong. The integrated ION graphics clearly make up for the underpowered Atom chip! I am running Windows 7 64-bit with 4 GB of RAM and Media Center is able to tune and record HD ClearQAM perfectly and playback of HD videos like H264 in MKV work perfectly. Navigating in Media Center can lag at times but otherwise it is flawless. Hulu Desktop even works well after allowing it to buffer adequately. I am using the beta version of Flash that is hardware-accelerated so that it doesn't overutilize the CPU.

1. Work well with windows 7
2. 720p and 1080p witn win 7 - XBMC run well
recommended

This board was amazingly easy to set up. Everything is integrated - no flexibility, but no messing around. I tweaked the bios just the tiniest bit and was able to get the thing dual booting Snow Leopard and Windows. It's not going to replace my new Mini any time soon, because hackintoshes aren't super easy to update, but for under $300, including the board, the memory, and the case, it makes a fine second machine for my son.

I deducted one star, because I couldn't figure out how to make it boot from usb. That meant I had to install my operating systems by hooking up my hard drive to my other mac and windows machines. If I had known, I would have bought a SATA dvd drive (there's no IDE connector on this, either - just the sata ports).

UPDATE: per a commenter, the board will boot from a usb cd/dvd drive, just not from a thumb drive. That would bring my rating up half a star to 4.5 stars.

The atom processor is nice and snappy, and I installed 4 gb of memory.

The more I use this board, the better I like it.

UPDATE 2: another commenter knows how to make it boot from a thumb drive - Actually it will boot from a thumb drive; it's just counter intuitive a little bit. When you go into the BIOS you have to select the thumb drive as the preferred primary hard disk. That way, if the USB stick is present it will go there first to boot and if it is not, it will fall back to a SATA drive and boot normally.

THANK YOU! With that, I have revised my review up to five stars. The computer I built with this little thing is one of the quietest, cleanest running, most reliable machines I've ever owned, let alone built.

I brought for two weeks. it run so smooth, and quiet.
Much better video quality than my other desktop platform with Intel chipset.
I would recommend to everyone!! Great buy