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Results Continued…

720P HD Performance

HD Testing

Using the Speed Way HD clip downloaded from Microsoft I benchmarked the 720P performance of the Zotac Ion. It played the clip easily without any lag or audio out of sync. Checking the CPU usage shows a very respectable 15%, this often fluctuated between 12% and 20%.

Zotac Ion A-Series Motherboard

1080P HD Performance

HD Testing

For 1080P testing we’ll be using a clip from ‘Taxi 3’ which was also a clip downloaded from Microsoft’s website. The Asus EeeBox struggled to play this clip. The Zotac on-the-other-hand played it with ease. There was no obvious lag and the sound was synchronised perfectly. Checking the CPU utilization showed 22% – this didn’t peak any higher than 26%; nor did it drop below 17%.

Zotac Ion A-Series Motherboard

Power Consumption

As you can see the Zotac uses 50% more power than the Asus EeeBox. Although this sounds a lot, 30 watts is still hardly anything for a computer system. The better performance is the reasoning for the larger power usage.

Zotac Ion A-Series Motherboard

Noise

It’s a shame the heatsink doesn’t give sensible temperatures without a fan installed because the little 60mm fan is quite noisy. My best advice would be to remove the fan and install a low RPM 80mm instead – you will need to improvise slightly though as it won’t be a straight fit.

('DiggThis’)
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