14 DAY TRIAL // Earlier this month, Acer has officially unveiled the world's first computer system designed to accommodate NVIDIA's highly appreciated Ion platform. It now appears that yet another company has decided to provide its support for the Ion, by releasing a motherboard that will enable users or system makers to produce their own Ion-based nettops. This is the case with Zotac and its newly launched Mini-ITX motherboard that is designed to offers support for Intel's Atom processors and NVIDIA's GeForce 9400 motherboard graphics processing unit.
The graphics card and motherboard maker, a partner of the Santa Clara, California-based graphics maker, has launched two models of its Ion-supporting motherboard lineup. The IONITX-A-U and IONITX-B-E are designed to support Intel's Atom N330 dual-core and Atom N230 single-core processors. Both boards are based on NVIDIA's MCP79 chipset and come with a built-in GeForce 9400 graphics processing core, enabling support for PureVideo HD, CUDA, PhysX technologies.
As you probably expect from an Ion-based platform, both boards are equipped with HDMI, DVI and VGA outputs, two DDR2 memory DIMMs, and a large aluminum cooling solution for both the CPU and the on-board GPU. Additional features include support for up to 10 USB 2.0 ports, SATA 2 connectors with support for RAID 0/1/0+1, eSATA port, Wi-Fi connector, PS/2 keyboard port, Serial and a Mini PCI Express slot.
Despite no word on which system vendor is considering to launch a new computer system that will be based on this small motherboard from Zotac, we do know the pricing at which both the IONITX-A-U and IONITX-B-E will be available in Japan. According to the English version of Expreview, Zotac's new Ion-based boards will be priced at Yen29980 (US$303) and Yen19980 (US$202), respectively.