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Zotac ION A-Series ITX Motherboard
Author: Rhys Published: July 17th, 2009 5:54 PM Category: Motherboards,Reviews
Results
General Usage
Just like the Asus EeeBox, boot times using the Zotac were nice and quick. Shutdown and Startup speeds averaged at between 20-25 seconds which isn’t bad at all.
In Windows the system did not hang once during testing. I ran many applications and not once did the computer crash – even with a miniscule 1GB of RAM installed. For general internet browsing, instant messaging and day-to-day tasks the CPU utilization never went above 30%. This is certainly a good result.
Unfortunately the Zotac ION doesn’t offer the battery capabilities that the Asus B204 offers. However, it’s still an energy efficient system as you’ll see for yourself in the power usage results later on in the review.
Temperatures
Ambient Temperature: 21 degrees Celsius.
With Fan
At idle you can see the CPU Core and GPU temperature stayed around the 30 degree mark. This is a nice low temperature which will not damage the system.
As you can see at load the temperatures hardly increase at all. This shows that the fan is doing a good job in keeping everything running cool and smoothly.
Without Fan
At idle with no fan installed the GPU and Core temperature went up to 35 degrees. This is only five degrees more than the temperature achieved with a fan installed. This is a very good result for a fully passively cooled system and won’t cause any issues.
At load the temperatures increased more than 10 degrees in some places. The Core 1 and Core 3 temperatures got dangerously high as you can see from the symbols. From these results you can see it’s probably best to run the Zotac Ion with the fan installed on the motherboard.
Zotac really should have mentioned this in the manual or had the fan pre-installed to the heatsink as it seems to give the impression the fan is optional when in fact it shouldn’t be at all.
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