First Ion with internal optical drive

May 4, 2009 14:15 GMT  ·  By

NVIDIA's ION platform has been making the headlines since early this year, when the Santa Clara, California-based graphics chip maker officially announced the platform. Since its debut, consumers have been anxious to know which system vendors would be jumping on the ION bandwagon and unveil their own designs. That happened when Acer became the first vendor to officially introduce a nettop that combined an Intel Atom processor with NVIDIA's Ion platform. However, it appears that others will also roll out nettops built on the Ion, including motherboard maker ASRock, which recently showcased its NetTop ION 330 Series, at an NVIDIA event.

 

The Taiwanese company isn't necessarily new to the PC market, as it already showcased a couple of Atom-based models at this year's Computex 2009 show in Hanover, Germany. With this new design, it will try to improve the performance of today's low-power PCs, with the help of NVIDIA's Ion chipset, which takes advantage of a better overall system configuration, when compared to Acer's AspireRevo.

 

Inside the ASRock NetTop Ion 330, there's a dual-core Atom processor, combined with an integrated NVIDIA graphics chip. The system is equipped with 2GB of DDR2 800MHz dual-channel memory, but supports a maximum of 4GB of memory. There's a SATA 2.5-inch hard drive with a capacity of 320GB, accompanied by a integrated Super Multi DVD optical drive, one of the main features that set ASRock's design apart from many other nettops on the market.

 

Additional features of the upcoming NetTop ION 330 include one HDMI and one VGA output, in addition to 6 USB 2.0 ports and a Gigabit Ethernet LAN connector. The system measures (D)186mm x (W)195mm x (H)70mm and weighs in at just 1.69kg. With a design that is more practical than appealing, the NetTop ION 330 should be showcased during Computex 2009, early next month, by which time we should know more on the system's pricing and availability.