Our testing methods
I don't have any nettops in house, but our recent work with budget ultraportable notebooks gives us some interesting fodder for performance comparisons. Today we've lined up an HP Pavilion dv2 equipped with a single-core Athlon Neo processor and Radeon HD 3410 integrated graphics, a Samsung NC20 with a Via Nano processor and integrated S3 graphics, and an Eee PC 1000H with the venerable Atom N270 and GMA 950. We've tried to come up with a reasonable configuration for the IONITX, throwing in 2GB of memory and a 2.5" Western Digital Caviar Blue hard drive. We elected to run Windows Vista on the Ion board, not only because Nvidia touts the GeForce 9400's ability to make Aero look all spiffy, but because Vista's integrated media center GUI makes it a prime candidate for home theater PCs.

All tests were run three times, and their results were averaged.

System HP Pavilion dv2 Asus Eee PC 1000H Samsung NC20 Zotac IONITX-A
Processor AMD Athlon Neo MV-40 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270 1.6GHz Via Nano ULV 2250 1.3GHz+ Intel Atom N330 1.6GHz
System bus HyperTransport 800MHz 533MHz (133MHz quad-pumped) 800 MT/s (200MHz quad-pumped) 533MHz (133MHz quad-pumped)
North bridge AMD RS690E Intel 945GSM Via VX800 Nvidia MCP7A-ION
South bridge AMD SB600 Intel ICH7M Via ID8353
Memory size 2GB (1 DIMM) 1GB (1 DIMM) 1GB (1 DIMM) 2GB (2 DIMMs)
Memory type DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz
CAS latency (CL) 5 4 - 5
RAS to CAS delay (tRCD) 5 4 - 5
RAS precharge (tRP) 5 4 - 5
Cycle time (tRAS) 15 12 - 15
Audio codec IDC codec with 6.10.6138.62 drivers Realtek ALC6628 with 5.10.0.5683 drivers Realtek codec with
5.10.0.5740 drivers 		Realtek ALC662 codec with
2.22 drivers
Graphics ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3410 with 8.563.3.1000 drivers Intel GMA950 with 6.14.10.4926 drivers Via Chrome9 IGP with 6.14.10.182 drivers Nvidia GeForce 9400M with 185.43 drivers
Hard drive Western Digital Scorpio Blue 320GB 5,400 RPM Seagate Momentus 5400.4 160GB 5,400 RPM Samsung Spinpoint M HM160HI 5,400RPM Western Digital Scorpio Blue 320GB 5,400 RPM
Operating system Microsoft Vista Home Premium x64 with Service Pack 1 Microsoft Windows XP Home with Service Pack 3 Microsoft Windows XP Pro with Service Pack 3 Microsoft Vista Home Premium x32 with Service Pack 1

We used the following versions of our test applications:

All the tests and methods we employed are publicly available and reproducible. If you have questions about our methods, hit our forums to talk with us about them.