At $179, NVIDIA Ion solution loses all of its appeal
Update 5/15/2009 – I made a mistake and didn’t factor in the DC power supply you get with the $179 price on the Ion. That means I need to include a power supply in the alternative.
TechReport just reviewed one of the first mini-ITX NVIDIA Ion platform solutions from Zotac which involves an NVIDIA 9300 graphics adapter and Intel Atom 330 1.6 GHz dual-core CPU. The problem is that its MSRP is priced at $179 and at that price, one can buy a far better integrated graphics Intel G45 motherboard and Intel Conroe-L 1.8 GHz CPU for less money. While the street price for the Zotac Ion solution might be less than $179, it will likely not be too much lower. The superior performing G45/Conroe-L solution shown in Table 1 could be had for a mere $132 $175 which completely strips all of the appeal of the Ion solution. The street price for the Ion system should come down in price a little but the lack of performance for the money is some concern for me.
Table 1 – Bare bone platform
| Item | Cost |
| Foxconn G45 MicroATX motherboard
ICH10R storage controller (RAID 0, 1, 10, 5) and Blu-ray capable HDMI graphics |
$92 |
| Intel “Celeron” 430 Conroe-L 1.8 GHz
Stock speed much faster than dual-core Atom, and can easily clock to 2.88 GHz |
$40 |
| Sparkle SPI220LE 220 watt PSU | $43 |
| Platform total | $175 |
Furthermore, I can’t say I’m too confident about motherboards based on NVIDIA chipsets since I’ve been burned on them before. The NVIDIA 7050 platform which was introduced less than two years ago never got S3 suspend mode working right without crashing during wake up. The original BFG review board based on the NVIDIA 7050 chipset bombed the suspend test and a recent ECS model GF7050VT-M I got for my cousin had the exact same problem. What’s even more shocking to me was that driver development seems to have ended in 2007 which is the same year the product came out.
This is not to say I don’t like NVIDIA graphics cards which are not the same thing as their motherboard chipsets. I actually favor NVIDIA graphics cards because they support a development platform called CUDA which allows some applications like password cracking and video encoding to operate 10 times faster than the fastest CPU. Video game support also seems to be better with NVIDIA graphics. But the 7050 chipset fiasco has left a foul taste in my mouth for NVIDIA motherboard chipsets and the price doesn’t impress me too much either. Intel graphics on the other hand have always lagged in terms of video processing and gaming support but that’s getting better recently especially with the G45 line. More importantly, Intel motherboard chipsets have always been well supported and while they’re not always perfect (no product is), at least I know that newer drivers will come and fix the issues.
Be sure to check out my follow up on how to build a perfect Home Theater PC for under $600.
I would try the Zotac 9300 Mainboard. Not because of the Geforce 9300, but because of the PCI Express slot that would allow for some growth.
Again, form factor is out the window. I was a bit saddened by the Ion cost as I was praying it would answer all of my problems.
My only ambition is that competition spurns vendors to drop their costs in order to compete.
NuCrash, the MicroATX G45 motherboard has more PCI-X slots.
$179 is probably too much for the Ion platform. Price will probably fall to around $150 street. At that price point it is decent for a HTPC or a Car PC. Your Conroe-L pricing doesn’t include a DC power supply and a wireless card that is integrated. Add those two, you are looking at probably $150-160.
So eventually those two platforms will be at price parity. Given price parity, Ion isn’t bad at all. Here is why:
8W Atom 330 + 12W Ion gives you a 20W platform power solution
2.5W Atom N270+ 12W Ion gives you a 14.5W platform power solution
35W Conroe-L + 24W G45 + 4.5W ICH10R gives you a 63.5W platform power solution. (41.5W difference so far)
The Atom solution will give you a 50W power savings assuming 80% efficient PS. Not much to brag about, still enough to notice. 35W Conroe probably needs a little fan to cool, while 8W Atom is completely silent. I would also rate the Ion IGP over the G45 IGP for better driver support. Intel’s IGP drivers have been crap. (I have a X3100 based laptop that used to have memory corruptions due to the X3100 IGP)
The Celeron does give you more CPU horse power.
DC power supplies are expensive, and it is not included in your $150 Ion price. Embedded solutions probably don’t require the performance of an NVIDIA 9300 in general so the market you’re talking about is fairly small. I’d have to see what kind of battery life an Ion+Atom netbook is capable of.
No question that Intel IGP drivers have had big problems, but it’s gotten stable at this point in time. NVIDIA on the other hand never bothered fixing the relatively new 7050 chipset for S3 suspend, and that is a show stopper for me.
The 35W Conroe-L definitely needs a fan, but the G45 chipset doesn’t need a fan. The Atom doesn’t need a fan, but the NVIDIA 9300 used in the Ion may need a fan or the chassis has to be designed to blow a lot of air on to the GPU heatsink.
The Conroe-L system might peak at 50W more power consumption than the Ion platform but we can probably get it to idle at around 35W (or less) whereas an Ion system will idle at 25W (if you use a good DC power supply). So most of the time the system power difference will be around 10W. I’m not kidding when I say 35W because I’ve gotten dual-core Core 2 systems down to 38W idle.
The Zotac IONITX-A and -C models which you are refering to as the $179 parts (and which TS was expecting to come down to $150 on the street) do include an AC/DC power adapter and onboard DC/DC converters.
You were also suggesting a few months ago that it would be possible to run a complete Intel Atom solution on Power over Ethernet. I wonder why you’re now estimating board and cpu alone to exceed that margin by 10W when idle.
OK, you’re right about the price, didn’t see the AC/DC brick they include. I’ll add a correction to the blog posting.
15W PoE using the 945GSE + single core Atom is possible. The platform TDP is 7 or 8 watts I believe. When they integrate the 945 into the CPU package, it will be roughly the same TDP. The 945GC TDP would be too much for PoE.
The situation as slightly changed as we now have one solution that retails at $175 at newegg and one at $169. The latter is much more compact, cooled passively and draws less power. It has the significantly slower CPU but is still able to play Bluray content when using software that supports the chipset.
Yes, it’s a niche product and that’s exactly the reason why it doesn’t have the best price/performance ratio. It still has its applications with only a few alternatives on the market.
Where there’s room for mATX and silent active cooling I’d personally always prefer something with enough CPU horsepower to decode HD in software (Core 2 Duo or Athlon X2), since support for chipset hardware decoders is rare. I’m using XBMC on my HTPC, for example, and it doesn’t support hardware acceleration yet. My HTPC still plays the infamous "birds" sample smoothly on an X2 5400+ and a Gigabyte 780G board, a combination currently retailing at $125 on newegg. It admittedly draws close to 80W at the plug under such loads (including 2 SSDs, 1 HD and WLAN). That doesn’t bother me much as the output device draws around 300W
.
You can build a mini-ITX G45 system, it’s just that it’s harder to find a case for it though I am considering building a custom metal mini-ITX case. Furthermore, I’d rather have the extra space for extra hard drives for an HTPC system which also acts as a storage server.
Also, having the extra CPU power may be necessary if you want to serve files over the network at maximum speed at around 600 Mbps.
http://news.digitaltrends.com/news-article/19967/nvidia-weighs-in-on-intel-chip-pricing-unfair
Intel Atom plus GMA == $25
Intel Atom Stand alone == $45
Intel is fighting nVidia adoption anyway they can. Too bad AMD had to put themselves in a tough place by buying ATI. This seems pretty much like a dirty trick any company with an upper hand would do if they wanted to undercut the competition.
If we think about this though and I know that even if Intel Atom’s price dropped from $45 to and I am being optimistic here, $15, we are talking only $30 dollars. However, with some markups that happen along the way, we could make some significant cuts to the cost of the Ion setup and possibly become competitive with the larger setups like you have demonstrated here George.
I doubt that is an accurate pricing scheme. If that were the case, then people could just buy the chip and IGP together and discard the IGP.
It will be moot with the next gen Atom because the IGP is on the same die as the CPU. It will be cut out from the 300 mm wafer.
As far as I understand the article, the pricing was researched by Reuters and I wouldn’t dismiss it so easily. These are naturally not Joe Enduser prices and you probably can’t even acquire the different options through the same channel. It’s quite possible that Intel sells the platform bundle to selected partners at a much lower price and under the requirement to sell products using the chipset. It also doesn’t need to be a fixed price, but the effective price after factoring in rebates like platform marketing incentives. That’s the exact practice Intel has recently been fined for by the EU Commission and which they notably didn’t deny in fact, but only claimed to be within the law.