Performance
Browsing is what most folks do with their PCs most of the time, so it's a good place to begin our performance analysis. FutureMark's Peacekeeper benchmark tests JavaScript functions that the company says are commonly used on websites like YouTube, Facebook, Gmail, and others. To test Flash performance, we used the GUIMark rendering benchmark.

The IONITX doesn't fare so well in our browser benchmarks, likely due to the fact that we're running Windows Vista. Our other Atom-based system, the Eee PC 1000H, scores a little higher running Windows XP. The Zotac board's extra Atom core certainly doesn't help it here, nor does the platform's second memory channel. To be fair, though, the IONITX doesn't feel any slower in day-to-day browsing.

Next up we have 7-Zip's built-in benchmark, which tests file compression and decompression performance. We used the 32-bit client and let the test run up to 10 iterations.

7-Zip is multithreaded, given the IONITX's dual-core Atom a chance to shine. The board's performance is nearly twice that of the Eee PC and even faster the Pavilion dv2, which has a full-fledged (albeit single-core) Athlon 64 under the hood.

For a quick gaming benchmark, we used FRAPS to record frame rates across five 60-second intervals in Quake Live's beginner sorting level. The Eee PC and NC20 ran the game at 1024x576 while the dv2 was capable of smooth frame rates at the system's native screen resolution of 1280x800. We ran the IONITX at 1280x1024 because, well, see for yourself:

The IONITX plays Quake Live reasonably well at 1280x1024 resolution. In fact, its median low frame rate is much higher than that of the Eee PC, despite the fact that the Ion board is pushing twice the number of pixels.

Quake Live isn't a particularly demanding title. However, even with a GeForce 9400 and dual-core Atom processor, the Ion platform isn't much of a gamer. The integrated GeForce all but guarantees game compatibility and decent visuals, but we've found that limited CPU power causes far too much stuttering in games like Call of Duty 4 and Half-Life 2, let alone more recent and demanding titles. If you're looking to play games on the IONITX, we'd advise you to sticking to what are increasingly referred to as casual titles. AudioSurf, for example, runs nice and smooth on the IONITX with the second-highest detail level setting at 1280x1024.

World of Warcraft is playable, too. With the mix of high, medium, and low detail levels automatically set by the game at 1024x768 resolution, we enjoyed frame rates in the mid 30s and low 40s while plodding around on a random server.

We also logged some time with the Battlefield: Heroes beta and can report that the IONITX managed frame rates in the mid 20s with medium in-game detail levels at 800x600. The game wasn't completely smooth, but it was playable.

Ultimately, the IONITX does little to improve the Ion formula's fairly limited gaming grunt. This platform is really geared more toward multimedia playback, and it's here that the IONITX shines the brightest. We tested video playback with a number of clips, including standard-definition content of the sort one might acquire over BitTorrent, HD content at 480p, 720p, and 1080p, and H.264, MPEG2, and VC-1 flavors of high-bitrate Blu-ray. The IONITX handled it all, with only a few exceptions.

Back when we first tested the Ion platform's Blu-ray chops, we found that playback wasn't smooth with Nature's Journey, a 1080i title we were playing back at 1080p. We were using PowerDVD, which is compatible with the GeForce 9400's PureVideo HD decode block, so application acceleration wasn't the issue. Instead, Nvidia said the stuttering we experienced was caused by the combination of the fact that PureVideo was only optimized for 1080p content and the fact that the Ion reference design had only a single memory channel. Apparently they were right, because the IONITX had no problem smoothly playing back Nature's Journey or any of our other Blu-ray movies at 1920x1080 resolution over HDMI. In fact, CPU utilization only hovered around 30% during Blu-ray playback.

Thanks to its PureVideo HD support, PowerDVD also had no problems handling 480p, 720p, and 1080p movie trailers. The 480p and 720p clips even played back smoothly in QuickTime, which doesn't make use of GPU acceleration. Our 1080p clip stuttered too much to be watchable, though. Speaking of stuttering, the IONITX proved incapable of handling HD YouTube content. That's not terribly surprising considering how CPU-intensive Flash-based video playback seems to be.

Curious to see just how much power the IONITX was sucking during testing, I hooked the power supply up to our trusty watt meter to measure total system power draw, excluding the monitor and speakers. Even with optical and hard disk drives hooked up, the IONITX system drew just 26W at idle and only 34W during Blu-ray playback. Impressive.

Next, I used SpeedFan to monitor system temperatures and found that the IONITX's GPU idles at about 61°C on an open test bench. SpeedFan reports four different CPU core temperatures for the Atom N330, and those ranged from 52-60°C at idle. During Blu-ray playback, GPU temperatures rose to 72°C with the CPU cores between 76 and 79°C. That's a little warm, but the system was perfectly stable through multiple movie loops. I even subjected the board to a Prime95/rthdribl CPU and GPU torture test and found that the system kept chugging for hours on end as its GPU temperature peaked at 80°C, while the CPU cores climbed to 94-95°C.