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ZOTAC IONITX-A-U Atom N330 1.6GHz Dual-Core 90 Watt PSU Mini ITX Intel Motherboard
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Technical Details
- ION's 16 high-speed stream processors- NVIDIA PureVideo HD technology
- Blu-ray playback
- D-Sub + DVI + HDMI
- Mini ITX Board
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By Skip M. (Houston, TX USA)
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.
By Glenn R. Howes (Nashua, NH)
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.
At the moment, I'm using the VGA connector for video, and the coax port for digital audio, but I'm hopeful of upgrading my TV soon and using HDMI.
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.
By S. Showalter (Ohio, USA)
The IONITX A-U isn't as good as its successor, the IONITX F-E (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002TKVK1M?ie=tag=a52-20&ie=UTF8). While the A-U comes with a 90 Watt PSU, it does not have PCI-E slot (the slot which is essential for adding a TV capture card). Other than that major lacking, the board is a well-designed board that worked great for what I could do with it. Needless to say, I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out a way to incorporate a TV capture card, and failed on all fronts.
While users who have digital cable can use the HDHomeRun (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0010Y414Q?tag=a52-20&ie=UTF8), we on the other hand only have analog cable. Therefore, it needed to work with my current TV card (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001E2T6Y4?tag=a52-20&ie=UTF8) which supports analog cable signals.
CASE
I used mine with this APEX case (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000WCQYU6?tag=a52-20&ie=UTF8), which works quite well.
MEMORY
The best memory to grab for any of these Zotac boards are either the Crucial XMS. Go for the 2GB (2 x 1GB, http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000CDLCGG?tag=a52-20&ie=UTF8) if you don't intend to ever watch Blu-Ray movies: (or) Go for the 4GB (2 x 2GB, http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000TPXULC?tag=a52-20&ie=UTF8) if you DO intend to watch Blu-Ray movies.
Hope this helps! :)
By B. Gant
I wanted to like this board. I has great specs. It would have been perfect as an HTPC. First board I received would power up but had no display output from any port. Returned this to Amazon for a replacement. 2nd board was totally dead and would not power up. Returned this one for a refund. I will not be buying Zotac products in the future.
By C.Anderson (Ohio)
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.
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