Zotac ION ITX-F Motherboard
Testbed, Temperatures & Overclocking
Published: 16th December 2009 | Source: Zotac | Price: £159 |
Testbed
Intel Atom 330 Dual Core Processor (Embedded)
Zotac ION ITX F Motherboard
2GB Patriot PC2-6400 DDR2 Memory
nVidia GeForce 8800GT 512mb GDDR3
320GB Samsung F1 7200RPM SATA II HDD
LG 22x SATA DVD+/-RW
Tagan 420W ATX Power Supply Unit
Windows Vista Home Premium SP1
Temperatures
Disappointingly, we were unable to run our test sample without it's included 80mm fan. Under conditions where a nearby fan intake or power supply intake fan is present, "fanless" operation might be possible. That being said, the included fan was reasonably quiet and didn't have have a noticeable motor noise.
Overclocking
First of all, I would like to mention that it's somewhat unfair to expect huge overclocks from a small form factor, embedded CPU platform but as our name might indicate, we're going to give it a shot anyway. The process itself was relatively painless, as we steadily ramped up the Atom 330's Front Side Bus. We did reach a point (circa 2.1GHz) where the motherboard would no longer boot, however a hard power cycle was all it took to trigger a CMOS Checksum Error to place us back in BIOS. Our final stable clockspeed came to a very reasonable 2.07GHz @ 172FSB (690MHz Effective). While further voltage increases had no effect on further overclocking, we were still very impressed with the 470MHz overclock that had been achieved on a comparatively basic processor.
Most Recent Comments
Excellent read.
I think the phoneyness of the artificial benchmarks raise their ugly head here and shouldn't be too frowned upon in judgement.
The CoD4 w/8800gt is still impressive for me. Would like to have seen the stock 1.6 w/8800gt, but sneakingly think it'll be as-good, or good enough.
Would be nice to have dropped an AMD HD4xxxx+ card in there too to see how much the cpu effects the driver dependence.
It's certainly a different science than a regular mobo/cpu, and I like what it's achieving as I liked the previous models.
Soon as all the 775 kit I have goes south, I'd certainly consider for a htpc/media front room effort, with a gfxcard that u can keep in reserve. Although by the time that comes, there'll be new kit about I'm sure.
Good stuff, love a comment on the onboard sound.Quote
I think the phoneyness of the artificial benchmarks raise their ugly head here and shouldn't be too frowned upon in judgement.
The CoD4 w/8800gt is still impressive for me. Would like to have seen the stock 1.6 w/8800gt, but sneakingly think it'll be as-good, or good enough.
Would be nice to have dropped an AMD HD4xxxx+ card in there too to see how much the cpu effects the driver dependence.
It's certainly a different science than a regular mobo/cpu, and I like what it's achieving as I liked the previous models.
Soon as all the 775 kit I have goes south, I'd certainly consider for a htpc/media front room effort, with a gfxcard that u can keep in reserve. Although by the time that comes, there'll be new kit about I'm sure.
Good stuff, love a comment on the onboard sound.Quote
@Diablo
You have a fair point about the PCI-Express 16x slot. Even if you don't wish to use a dedicated graphics card, you're free to drop a PCI-E 1x/2x/4x card instead.
@Rasta
As far as the sound chip goes, there wasn't a lot to report. The sound quality itself when paired with a Cambridge Audio 5.1 set was more than acceptable and the cpu utilisation was low and of little concern. During this review, I didn't have access to a Monitor/TV with inbuilt speakers and so sound over HDMI could not be tested however I had no complaints with the onboard sound.
Thanks for the feedback.Quote
You have a fair point about the PCI-Express 16x slot. Even if you don't wish to use a dedicated graphics card, you're free to drop a PCI-E 1x/2x/4x card instead.
@Rasta
As far as the sound chip goes, there wasn't a lot to report. The sound quality itself when paired with a Cambridge Audio 5.1 set was more than acceptable and the cpu utilisation was low and of little concern. During this review, I didn't have access to a Monitor/TV with inbuilt speakers and so sound over HDMI could not be tested however I had no complaints with the onboard sound.
Thanks for the feedback.Quote
I was thinking it would be best to use as a mini fold rig with the pcie, super lower power ect. Or drop a nice sound card in and have it as a high end HTPC.Quote
Very good Mobo for a HTPC machine.Quote
CSS Valid
I suppose you could run a decent home media server with the pcie slot used for a high performance raid card and have all your movies and music piped all over the house?Quote