Instead we’re given two new slogans: Inspiring Innovation, Persistent Perfection (hooray for alliteration) and Perfectly suit your digital lifestyle.ĪSUS’ Ion board doesn’t come with a power supply, it instead has a 24-pin ATX power supply connector and a 4-pin 12V connector for CPU power. This is the AT3N7A-I:Īlso gone is the North American favorite “Rock Solid, Heart Touching” phrase on the box. Unlike the ASRock and Zotac Ion solutions, ASUS gave its Ion board a real and unnecessarily complex name. The whole package sets you back $379.99 (ASRock does charge a slight premium for building the thing).Ī couple of weeks ago we got word that the second mini-ITX Ion motherboard was coming our way. We're not too far away from having P4-class PCs in the space of a hard drive. The ASRock Ion differed from the Zotac Ion motherboard in that it was a barebones system complete with mini-ITX chassis, external power supply, 2GB of RAM, slim optical drive and 320GB hard drive. ASRock put out an Ion system based on the Intel Atom 330 processor note the use of the word system. It’s no surprise that ASUS didn’t build an Ion motherboard or an Ion netbook for that matter.ĪSUS tested the waters with its value manufacturing brand earlier this year. The first place you found the Atom processor was in ASUS’ Eee PC and Eee Box. I’m not even sure if Pine Trail will address that market either.ĪSUS was Intel’s launch partner for Atom. It’s a good product and it fills a niche that Intel currently has no answer to. I can’t tell you how well the Zotac Ion has sold, but reading our review and user experiences with the board I can tell you that customers are pleased. Zotac doesn’t get preferential treatment by Intel and thus Zotac doesn’t have to worry about ruffling any feathers by releasing an Ion motherboard. While Zotac builds several Intel motherboards, they are hardly considered a tier 1 motherboard manufacturer. Zotac built the first mini-ITX Ion motherboard. They don’t want to appear too eager and thus Intel’s closest partners wait to see if a product like Ion succeeds before attempting to jump on the bandwagon. Intel’s partners are very cautious when supporting a product like Ion.

Intel doesn’t like being upstaged by anyone. Intel still sold the CPUs but it lost the chipset sale and got upstaged by NVIDIA. This offered better performance and modern features compared to Intel’s 945G chipset, what Intel was bundling with Atom. NVIDIA’s Ion platform, at least when first introduced, combined Intel’s Atom CPU with NVIDIA’s GeForce 9300/9400M integrated graphics chipset. Intel antitrust suit, but that’s not the point of today’s story. How Intel is able to ensure this is the crux of the AMD v. The first companies to support non-Intel products are those that have the weakest relationships with Intel.

Chargeur asrock ion 330