ZOTAC IONITX-A-U Atom 330 1.6GHz Dual-Core Mini ITX Motherboard/CPU Combo

Comment:
Quick enough for any HTPC desires, runnig 1080p without any glitch;Low power comsumption; Wifi-N;DVI/HDMI; a lot of USBs;eSATA;Good quality motherboard;External PSU for ultra-quiet HTPC;Super simple overclocking to 2.0GHz. fan is on loud side and no fan speed manage;operating a bit hotter than I like. I don't know how some reviewers can claim running it fanless. Within 30 minutes, it reaches 84C open air at idle with room temperature around 20C. It doesn't require a lot of air, but it does require a fan. However, the supplied fan, 3000rpm, is a bit on louder side. I wish the board has BIOS fan speed manage to quiet it down. I connect it to 5V with a mod cable, operating at 1200rpm. Combined with a 2.5" WD blue drive, I have a almost slient HTPC method. You have to put the ear against the situation to hear any noise.Measured by Kill-A-Watt, the complete technique consumes just 18W at idle, and 23W complete load. By the way, if you want a truely energy-efficent Computer with low noise, stick with two.5" HD as a three.5" noisy drive calls for a lot much more than 30W under complete load.Now I hold this child operating 24ǝ as HTPC and file/backup/print server.Zotac IONITX-A-U; 2x1GB DIMMs; 640GB WD blue Cavier; slim ODD, Apex MD-100 case; iMicro Card Reader; Logitech MX Air.

Comment:
plays every thing the included fan is not that fantastic in terms of sound I bought a 100x100x12 fan with fluid dynamic bearings and it fits appropriate on prime of the heat-sink clearing any case (M350)allot of individuals are complaing that it runs hot, it runs hot since everyone assumes it is suppose to run with no a fan. the boards that ran with out a fan are the 230 boards.

Comment:
Completely Adore THIS BOARD, runs quiet, runs cool, and can power through 1080 MKVs. Buy IT!! with a 5400 rpm laptop drive and 4GB of ram in dual channel, this only draws like 25-30 watts of power at most. wish the gpu was a small bit more effective, just to give me that additional little margin of space, but i'm content. Also wish it drew only two watts of power, but thats wishfull thinking. making use of this with XBMC Reside 9.04.1 installed to a 40GB 5400 rpm laptop drive. I stream my films over gigabit from my FreeNAS server, so i only required the drive for storing the XBMC OS. Working with AEON skin, this board can play 1080's no issue. Aeon is a TINY TINY TINY bit slow, but definately a lot more than usable. Totally appreciate this board. I've overclocked it to 2.1ghz, but running at stock is still a lot more than enough.

Comment:
Nothing but, soon after quite a few attempts to get it to post with my first board, got OS installed. Soon after which it froze after a few minutes. Those had been the great items. The bad items: The RMA Board didn't even post. I tried a variety of memory / video / keyboard / mouse configs and don't even get a post. Would be pleased to give a much better critique if there was one thing to evaluation. Can't believe I just got that unlucky with 2 poor boards. Am I missing a thing? 11-129-068CASE ANTEC| ISK 300-65 R 13-500-027MB ZOTAC IONITX-A-U R20-145-184MEM 2Gx2|CORS TWIN2X4096-6400C5 R22-136-280NBHD 320G|WD 7K 16M WD3200BEKT

Comment:
right value and far more than enough cpu for a whs develop. i get 65-80mB/s sustained by means of gigabit from it with a samsung eco drive. by no means noticed cpu hit 100% even when sabnzbd is rebuilding blurays.runs cool with the stock fan (which is decently quiet) sitting on top rated of the heatsink, idles @ 38° Cextremely great assortment of hardware for the cost.. no way to screw fan to heatsink. ran with an open chassis and no fan, and temps reached 85° C inside 30 minutes. only two sata ports are ahci. i guess the third 1 was meant for an optical. there is no way to expand with more drives internally. i had originally hoped to expand up to five or 6 drives, but it's not going to happen with this board. the mini pci-e slot that is advertised is taken, and they don't sell mini pci-e sata controllers anyways. this is my greatest dissapointment and the reason why i'll most likely end up utilizing this mobo for a htpc and get the zotac G-E model for my server instead.

Comment:
The board is wonderful for an HTPC setup. Presently becoming employed with * Low power-use* HDMI output is solid* Handles HD & Blu-Ray playback with no situation* Built in wireless appears to be pretty good* No concerns with drivers on set up Not substantially in the way of cons, but there are a couple. First, it does not have a classic power supply connector on the board so any LED displays or other peripherals that hook into that connector won't function. Also, the board supports up to 4 GB of RAM so the larger quantity of RAM available to 64-bit operating systems is not supported. I tried utilizing this as an HTPC with Windows 7 making use of two GB of RAM. The RAM functions in a various Pc but it would result in a black screen in this one particular. Switching to a unique brand fixed that, and upgrading to four GB was undoubtedly worth it. The HTPC operates very nicely for more than-the-air Tv and internet streaming as properly as physical disc playback.

Comment:
Good Board for HTPC, power consumption around 30Watts. System functions excellent with MYTHTV. SPDIF works good! The Audio and Wifi Drivers have to be tweaked with to perform correctly in UBUNTU.Wifi is Azurewave (atheros ar5891). Overall this operates fantastic with Mythbuntu. It does all perform and would be excellent out of the box minus the Audio and Wifi Tweaks!

Comment:
This tiny guy is amazing. I got it to be an HTPC and it rocks its function like a pro. I utilized to run Ubuntu 9.04 (jaunty) and, now I'm on 9.10 (karmic). I ran XBMC on both with zero problems, sound and video over HDMI to a 32" 720p LCD Tv. I've been employing Boxee beta since the early release was obtainable, and it runs flawlessly on that as effectively. Took five-10 minutes to get the sound set up appropriately (just had to edit .asoundrc) but if you can't deal with 5-10 minutes of google maybe "building" an HTPC isn't for you. Stick to "assembling". That aside, almost everything else worked fantastic out of the box. Using the most up-to-date Nvidia drivers (used 180 by means of 195, all work fine), 1 core out of the 2ǚ offered is like 12-25% utilized (Depending on interlacing/etc) through HD playback and the others are idle. Wireless, RJ-45 NIC, pretty considerably everything functions just fine. I've had to re-set it up a couple of times for various reasons (all my own issues) and it only ever takes a few minutes from a fresh install The fan is a tiny loud/cheap. "my little pony" grade plastic. Some folks complain about the less than snug fit of the sata cables in the mobo. The cables that come with the board kind of suck, but the sockets are fine. just get a couple new cables if you assume you need to have them. been operating with the ones that came with the unit Ɠ-four months now), and I've never had a reside disconnect concern. The case I got for it came with a energy supply which I'm clearly not utilizing. So I gutted it and threw a case fan in the PSU chassis, blowing down more than the CPU. Just some random Antec 3-speed fan. It's practically silent on the low setting, and a gentle breeze is a lot to maintain the monolithic heatsink cool during video playback. Even tried running folding @ property to get the CPU fired up, and it stabilized at an acceptable temp ࿈-50 dec C). So if you're acquiring a single of these, contemplate that even the least expensive mini-itx boxes come with a PSU, and if you're not utilizing it anyways, it could make a excellent option air mover. Bear in mind, spare components in your IT graveyard are for abusing.

Comment:
Excellent video overall performance with hardware accelerationWireless efficiency allows 720p streaming from a separate spaceExcellent package for an HTPC Mobo gets quite warm without included fan.Fan has a high-pitched whineNonetheless an atom computer - not meant for heavy computing Purchased for an HTPC for my living roomOperating Boxee, functions fantasticRemote would have been nice for the value - would have bought the ASUS except for the price distinction in a combo pack.

Comment:
Effective, Quiet, Quick, Windows 7 compatible, HDMI out, Built-in Wifi, NVidia chipset. Not a biggie but power supply cord only has 3 SATA power connectors and no four-pin Molex. When working with a Slimline SATA cable drive adapter those are often Molex, not SATA, so there's an incompatibility. I just spliced the Slimline power leads to the SATA power leads directly and bypassed plugs. Othewise you could by a ผ.99 adapter plug if you like spending more moola. Purchased this as a Newegg combo discount with an Antec ISK 300 case and it went together right nicely. The included Zotac Windows Bios utility wouldn't perform for me on Windows 7 so I did it the old fashioned way by using a USB floppy drive to flash the latest bios (bootable USB drive must operate also).It's hard to think this little issue is more powerful than my 2-year old desktop workhorse CAD machine I use everyday.Zotac IONITX-A-U Motherboard/CPU comboAntec ISK 300-65 (pulled 65w Antec PS and employed Zotac's 90W as an alternativeƞGB Kingston KVR800D2K2 DDR2 800 RAMSony Optiarc Slim 8X DVD±R Burner Model AD-7590S-01WD Scorpio Blue 320GB 2.5" SATA HDWindows 7 RC 64-bit version OS

Comment:
A continuation to my initial review, entitled "great little board" dated 9ቩ񳏉 (look it up). I just wanted to update the site with some information. Official support for monitoring this MB is in the mainline kernel/lm-sensors. One particular demands to modprobe two modules: coretemp and lm90. As I write this, I'm running kernel two.6.34 and sensors 3.12 and can read the core temp + cpu + mb temp. Nonetheless missing are the fan speeds which are readily available in the BIOS (CPU fan + case fan) but for some cause, sensors cannot detect them. None, adore the board, great low power server. $ sensorscoretemp-isa-0000Adapter: ISA adapterCore : ფ.°C (crit = ᄦ.°C) coretemp-isa-0001Adapter: ISA adapterCore 1: ტ.°C (crit = ᄦ.°C) coretemp-isa-0002Adapter: ISA adapterCore 2: ფ.°C (crit = ᄦ.°C) coretemp-isa-0003Adapter: ISA adapterCore three: ტ.°C (crit = ᄦ.°C) w83l771-i2c--4cAdapter: SMBus nForce2 adapter at 4d00temp1: ჩ.°C (low = -40.°C, high = ᄒ.°C) (crit = ᄡ.°C, hyst = ᄗ.°C) temp2: ჵ.1°C (low = -40.°C, high = ᄒ.°C) (crit = ꡦ.°C, hyst = ꡜ.°C)

Comment:
Little & Compact Runs cool, I have a light-on Blu-ray drive hooked into this factor with 4gigs ram operating Win7, factor is a blast. tried it with 2 gigs but that was laggy. Not genuinely a con as it was do-in a position with some extra tools but it is awfully modest and if your cobbling this together in a smaller case you might nee tweezers to go along with your driver... i have huge hands and it was not working well till wife gave me her tweezers from her dissection kit. If your receiving this get 4gigs.

Comment:
atom platform with decent graphics.run this as my desktop in a Lian Li Q07, SSD disk with certainly no fan. completely silent.It comes with a CPU fan, but in a great case you don't will need it. nothing

Comment:
Low power consumption, quiet, modest footprint, rapidly, great internet browser. Initially, I wanted to use the case power supply to power the dvd and hd; even so, this mobo as advertized, has it's personal power supply and plugging the case power into the mobo is not an alternative. There's no way to get power out of the case sata and 4 pin connectors to power anything; consequently, the case ps is useless (the only way the case power works is if you initial plug it into the mobo which is not an option, there's no connector). You should power the case fan, dvd and hd from the male four pin output power connector on the mobo, so expect to have to jury rig your power cables due to the fact what comes with the kit might not operate out of the box. Two twin 4 pin power cables (not in the kit) and the one four pin to three sata (included in the kit) worked for me, you can get cables from Comp USA if you need to, or order them from Newegg. Appear for an ITX case without a power provide and save a small cash. I'm quite pleased with this method.

Comment:
Size, power use, wireless included, decently priced. Worked out of the box with Fedora 11 x64 (even the wireless). Even overclocked, the atom at 2ghz feels sluggish no matter what I'm undertaking. Even typing in the firefox address bar with nothing at all else open (tabs, programs) is slow. I was hoping for a much more usable pc knowledge, I was incorrect. I took off two eggs mainly because well, it seems that's the ONLY factor it can do: play non-flash mediaThe heatsink also got suprisingly hot at times; I suspect due to the 9400M, and so I ran it with a extremely slow moving fan. Absolutely nothing against zotac or the atom itself, I just misjudged the capabilities of the chip. It's a excellent, stable little system although.

Comment:
So far the board has handled anything that I have thrown at it as far as Bluray, DVD, or Ripped media. Really like the built in WiFi, and there are a ton of ports, HDMI, USB... and so on. The dual core atom has kept pace and even surpassed what my old AMD processor was able to do, I am sure that it has to do with the Ion GPU offloading the graphics. Straightforward to construct as long as you comply with instructions. Can not wait for Flash update so the flash can be handled by the Gpu also! The only difficulty I have had was genuinely with Windows 7 attempting to load a driver that kept the system from starting, but I guess thats truly a Windows gripe. I strongly recomend this for a HTPC machine, or for those who are into it, it would make a Wonderful Carputer... Just get the b or the d model for carputer, also hard to get 19 volts from regulated in car.

Comment:
Looks real good. Just not what is advertised or described by Newegg This board has no PCI Express x1 expansion slot. This slot is taken up by the board's WIFI adapter. The WIFI board is soldered directly to where a PCIe slot would be. Newegg specifications ŕ x Mini PCI Express x1" is incorrect. I purchased a tuner with a PCI express x1 interface to go with this MB. guess I'll be returning the MB to find one that is compatible.

Comment:
Part three of my critique. Appear up the prev two parts by their titles: "great small board" and "great small board (part 3). Absolutely nothing. I posted a third portion just for informational purposes. 1) The Linux coretemp report the temperature 20 degrees LOWER than actual from all the analysis I have done. You must therefor have your temp monitoring software call a script that adds 20 to their values or patch the code your self.two) The factory heatsink is really good BUT the low high quality thermal pad and TIM used result in temps to be artificially high. You can do a fast modification and shave off about 12 degrees. Just eliminate the board from the case, flip it upside down and remove the 4 screws. Then get rid of the HS, clean it, apply some high excellent TIM and some copper shims (very crucial) and replace the HS. See this post at the zotac forums for pics and much more directions:www.zotacusa.com/forum/topic񳓲-ion-heatsink-mod/If newegg doesn't permit urls to be posted, merely go to the zotacusa forums>Z-SPOT - It's Time to Play>ZOTAC>ZOTAC Motherboards>Intel Boards>ZOTAC ION and search for "heatsink mod"

Comment:
Good tiny board, if you are reading this,no doubt you know all about Ion. Video acceleration,low power consumption,hyperthreading,and all in a small itx form factor. If you dont have windows you will have a tough time flashing the BIOS. Zotac gives two hyperlinks in their forum. You have to flash with bootable media and amiflash. Attempt out linux, even with wubi is fine, it is light on the technique and has totally free multimedia applications with vdpau, unlike windows exactly where you have to spend for hardware accelerated decoding. Lots of enjoyable. I can play warsow, call of duty, but mainly just for videos.

Comment:
Takes much less power than a light bulb. Dual core makes the slow CPU seem reasonably smooth.The wireless card has really excellent signal power -- far better than either of my routers which are supposed to be high powered.Video performance is quite superior for onboard video (thanks NVidia). Not a speed demon. I assume it's a bit more than priced -- you could develop a fairly quick program for much less money. The CPU plays flash somewhat slow for some reason; this is a known problem and can be remedied with a decoder card that takes spot of the wireless card. I use this for a media computer, and it runs Windows 7 Media Center nicely and has no matters when playing motion pictures or browsing the World-wide-web.I'm operating 2GB of RAM currently, and am debating on upgrading to 4GB.

Comment:
This board functions fantastic! It does every thing I hoped for (except install itself) and comes with 3 SATA cables which is a good small bonus. It Fits perfectly into my NES case mod project. It has lots of usb ports too! There's 6 on the back and supports 4 onboard. Getting an ION on there makes gaming possible which is a plus thinking about what my case is. The speedy shipping was also good.five Eggs for a good item and speedy shipping. - Runs hot (shouldn't be a problem with good cooling although)- wifi isn't the greatest- Only supports four gigs of ram-The bios takes obtaining utilised to. There's TONS of selections there but only a couple of have descriptions. I'm using this board for my case mod project which is making use of a gutted Nintendo Entertainment Method for the case. The inside of an NES is a fairly little space so ventilation isn't the greatest so it runs a bit hot. Ought to be fine with an added fan or other strategies of ventilation.

Comment:
I purchased this board more than a year ago for a girlfriend's christmas gift in a new personal computer. I built this in an M-350 case and hung it from a VESA mount on the back of a monitor.Efficiency/size ratio is very nice for the time, however it's far beyond outdated now. Running Windows 7 with 2GB of RAM this was capable of driving a 1920x1080 monitor and was mainly applied for internet browsing but worked nicely for Youtube (if you had the CUDA drivers enabled) and you can watch films and blu-rays just fine The fan for this motherboard is extremely high pitched and can turn into annoying, nonetheless it does move a lot of air. With no the fan this board can get really hot.The graphics are also sub par for just about anything, even though it can handle a few games at 1920x1080 resolutions it's not suggested (L4D2 on low settings ran at 24FPS)CPU is the greatest bottleneck here as well. Whilst the GPU alleviates some processing when employing CUDA supported apps it's otherwise quite useless. Great for a web browsing or low powered laptop, just don't expect to get too substantially efficiency out of it.

Comment:
On-board power!Smooth HD playback (streaming, blu-ray, files)Low power consumption.Runs at 2. GHz with no troubles. Proprietary heat sink. Thermal pad on CPU. See beneath.Low-cost SATA cables included fit a bit loosely. The heat sink and thermal pad, in my opinion, does an inadequate job of keeping the CPU cool out of the box ࿜C although tension testing). This was an uncomplicated fix (which can be located on the Zotac forums), and now I'm operating at 40C max.

Comment:
Loaded Win 7. Great streaming hd off ABC. Appears peppy for sub 100 watt HD Dual Core Atom with RAID 1, HDMI, DVI, anything!I like it.Employed supplied fan and went from 52c to 32c with NO noise.Yup. Non at all. Get one particular.640GD WD BlackCORSAIR 4GB ƒ x 2GB)DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) TWIN2X4096-6400C5Win 7Updated BIOS (Easy)Did I mention it's supprisingly fast with two overclockable 1.6GHz Procs, has HDMI 1.three w/ 7.1 audio, DVI, ten USB, RAID, wifi, measures 6 1ǘ" by 6 1ǘ", and has a Five YEAR WARRENTY?And the cables are integrated.Wicked cool with lobster.

Comment:
Exceptional selection for network storage or mobile p2p communitcations in my case lolz. Has a removable mini-pci wifi card. Runs a little warm with no the cpu fan installed (removed zotac plate to expose far more fins). Has 8 usb Ɩư), 1 serial and 1-1394 header on board. Weak wifi and wierd external power provide. Has space for a 20 pin power header, none installed. I was able to upgrade the wifi card employing a Umbiquiti 400mw SR71 802.11a/b/g/n card (์). Also added a 9dbi rubber ducky, wifi output pushed to three.2watts ࿃dbm), erp. Making use of a sata to esata cable I am in a position to run 1 opt and 3 - 2t difficult drives. I guess DC to DC power is nice if you wanted to run off of batteries... (note to previous poster, my degree is in electrical engineering :)