Nvidia's Ion: Lending Atom Some Wings

[duto]

Nice system(from a tech point of view), is quite evident that Atom has a lot to offer, never best matched,all the same the design is not clean at all, it seem(from the outside) as a homemade junior high school science project, there is no harmony in it, and the small holes in the side, what on earth the design guys at NVIDIA was thinking about?, what a shame!

 

[DeadlyPredator]

I hope this platform will crush Intel's damn GMA crap which can't run anything with shaders 3.0... such a netbook would be crazy:
Low power phenom processor, ION's 9400M, 2 GB ddr2-800, 160 gb 5400 rpm hdd

Intel = no progress, only more $$$ until competition have something better to offer

 

[DeadlyPredator]

From Intel's site

With a powerful 400MHz core and DirectX* 9 3D hardware acceleration, Intel® GMA 950 graphics provides performance on par with mainstream graphics card solutions that would typically cost significantly more.

The new Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator 950 (Intel® GMA 950) graphics core is an intelligent and responsive graphics engine built into the chipset that is on the motherboard. This integration provides incredible visual quality, faster graphics performance and flexible display options without the need for a separate graphics card.

Lol? Which cards? Nvidia TNT, ati rage 128??

 

[rangers641]

This would be a great platform to base many different home appliances off of. It's low power consumption is very attractive for NAS, HTPC, FTP, HTTP, etc. What about putting an SSD in this thing? How much power savings would we see there?

 

[findarato]

I just want to know when it will be out to buy.

 

[cletus_slackjawd]

I am more looking forward to the release of the new dual core atom desktop MSI Wind that will be out soon. It's fully built and just needs an O/S. I believe the MSRP will be $230.00 ~ $250.00

Nvidia will have to have an answer for that. I personally think MSI will have no real competition in that price range for a complete and decent quality non-gaming computer.

 

[findarato]

The msi computer is out, well in a bare bones setup http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856167037

 

[Guest]

I certainly hope manufactures get on the ION bandwagon. Even if Intel comes out with a better chipset to be paired with Atom that still means Linux users are SOL as far as hardware based HD video decoding is concerned. nVidia is the only one with a viable/working HD decoding API that developers actually care about and are implementing (aka VDPAU). Personally I don’t see this products strength being in the netbook market. It’s too powerful and netbooks would cut it off at the knees by removing most of the platform’s I/O configuration options. I feel the strength of ION will be in the nettop/settop(aka fully integrated HTPCs with a footprint the size of a DVD player or smaller) markets.

 

[cletus_slackjawd]

@findarato: not the built I'm looking for, well actually the same thing but I want the DVD, RAM, AND HDD bundled for savings. The complete package minus O/S is supposed to go for USD $230-240, significantly cheaper than building it on the egg.
http://global.msi.com.tw/index.php?func=newsdesc&news_no=723

 

[cletus_slackjawd]

At the very end of the link I provided, they list an expected price range of 7,500-8,000 Taiwan Dollars = 222.14~236.95 US Dollars.
It does have HDMI ports and Capable of being a HTPC. One update: no HDD? This has been changed because I've seen a 300GB listed previously. Here is another link: http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2009/01/15/msi-nettop-d130-is-j.html

 

[Guest]

How about some overlcocking and using the n330 model. Getting the CPU to about 2ghz should help eliminate the CPU bottleneck when "gaming". lol