[Kal-EL]

BSO* overclocks nVidia ION, Intel Atom 330 to 2.2 GHz

6/19/2009 by: Thomas Jørgen Jacobsen - Get more from this author



nVidia banged the ION drum heavily during CES 2009 and onwards. After initial tampering in the dark, Acer broke out with Ion-based desktop system, and the rest followed suit. Zotac, one of top nVidia partners came up with their own Ion platform - pairing the 1.6 GHz Intel Atom 330 with nVidia Ion chipset [rebranded GeForce 9400M chipset].
Recently, we got the chance to overclock a stock ASUS EEE PC, and with no hardware modifications to the system and some software tweaks, the EEE netbook yielded very solid overclocking scores. Now, what could we do with a motherboard that is not tied to a tiny little power supply?
Taking Zotac's ION-ITX-A mini-ITX board through its paces gave us a lot of experience with the ION platform, but with the Intel dual-core Atom as well. Again, just for the fun of it

Zotac's retail box with the motherboard...

BrightSideofNews

[Buckeye]

I really like these small form factor mini computers and this one looks very good.

I have a Atom here that I played around with and it was pretty fun. Saddly tho it did not have much over clock potential and I picked up the wrong board, it was on sale at Fry's and an impulse buy

I like this board much better tho.

[punx223]

dude that would make a sick HTPC

[Neuromancer]

I picked up a ITX board for my sisters rig, got a real good deal, takes AM2/+ cpus and runs a 3200 IGP. Sweet sweet performer for such a tiny thing.

Hearing a lot of mixed reviews on the Atom, but with the ION boards finally hittign the shelves, that should be changing