Finally, the reviews of Ion 2 are coming in, although not through netbooks. Instead, the first reviews for Ion 2 are coming in through home-theater oriented nettops such as the Zotac ZBOX. Equipped with a dual-core Atom and Ion 2 graphics, the Zotac ZBOX promises to provide for all of your home theater needs in a single tiny package.
But can it keep its promise? Well, sometimes. It seems that Ion 2, while technically more powerful, is handicapped by a platform bandwidth issue. As a result, the overall performance of Ion 2 isn’t much better than the original Ion. In fact, in some cases it is worse. According to AnandTech:
NVIDIA’s Next Generation ION isn’t exactly the follow on that we expected. While GPU performance has improved, in many cases it’s a bit slower than the original ION thanks to the anemic PCIe x1 connection to the chipset. This isn’t NVIDIA’s fault, it’s simply a reality that we have to deal with.
Didn’t see that coming, did you? Its a shame, because getting Ion right could be a big victory of Nvidia, but it seems that this new incarnation may not be what we were hoping for. The only real question to answer now is how Optimus, once it is implemented in Ion 2, benefits battery life.
Source: Anandtech
You must log in to post a comment.
{ 1 trackback }