Zotac ionitx-a-u anyone?

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Blade

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jul 10, 2002
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Anyone out there using the zotac ionitx-a-u motherboard for their HTPC?

i've read some mixed reviews on it and i'm not sure if I should get one to build my HTPC... I want to be able to play netflix mainly and also hulu... both in HD

the motherboard seems to be pretty nice... but I can't find any reviews about it playing netflix or not....
 
AMD + Zotac 8200 ITX

or

Intel + Zotac 9300 ITX

per your requirements.
 
Used Zotac 9300 and Intel E8400, great for small HTPC.
dsc01883r.jpg
 
yeah, if you want to use netflix and hulu, an ion is the last thing you want.

If you're playing H264 mkv files, etc. then it's great.
 
I'll probably end up getting the Zotac 9300 since i have a Core2 6600 I can use.. should be able to handle the hulu and netflix better....

I was hoping to use ionitx-a-u since it has such a low power consumption!
 
Call out Adobe for not implementing hardware support for Flash (how long has it been since they said they would? tick tock tick tock...). Most we can do is wait for 32nm or 22nm low voltage chips.
 
Blade said:
I was hoping to use ionitx-a-u since it has such a low power consumption!
Click to expand...
Honestly, it's kind of a dumb board (wait, is this the one with the onboard PSU?). Most mITX cases already come with a decent aimed at that particular case. It's a waste of space and money unless your building your own mITX case from scratch.

Asus makes a nicer Ion board for less anyways.
 
CrimandEvil said:
Honestly, it's kind of a dumb board (wait, is this the one with the onboard PSU?). Most mITX cases already come with a decent aimed at that particular case. It's a waste of space and money unless your building your own mITX case from scratch.

Asus makes a nicer Ion board for less anyways.
Click to expand...

Oh, unless of course you're trying to build a more silent system... :rolleyes: The main reason to stay away from any Atom/Ion based systems for HTPC use is, as stated earlier, because of the lack of HD Flash performance.
 
I haven't had Zotac's IONITX-A-U for very long, but here's some thoughts: It's speedier than I expected considering some of the negative reviews out there. It EASILY overclocked to 2.0GHz, and I don't even have to use the bundled fan (which is probably bundled for situations like 100F+ degree weather or something). Since the power supply is an external power brick there's less heat inside the case and no noisy power supply fan.

So it's completely silent, no moving parts, except for the HDD. Maybe one day I'll go SSD but for now I'm happy with the huge storage space regular HDDs provide. Here's a tip: download HDDScan, select your HDD, go to Features -> IDE Features and enable Automatic Acoustic Management (set to 128). The performance penalty is negligible.

It also idles at about 25 watts (that's with the HDD spinning and 2.1V memory) according to the Kill-A-Watt device. I haven't really pushed it yet, but so far with the things I'm doing (VNC at Gigabit speed, HFS, security webcam, etc.) I've only seen it jump to 29 watts.

At the moment I don't have a monitor hooked up to it (VNC only), although eventually I do plan on using it for HTPC purposes too. So I can't comment on the Hulu/Netflix performance (it would be too slow via VNC, obviously).

Because it is completely silent and also because of it's super low power usage I think the IONITX-A-U is a winner. Eventually Flash will probably have hardware acceleration.
 
With the flash anouncement, I'm convinced that the Ion platforms actually have a future as the low end of HTPCs.

I'm curious now if anyone has tried actual PVR functionality on one of these boards using an USB HDTV tuner card. Anyone? It would be interesting how this board deals with that sort of situation in Vista or Windows 7...
 
Another note, we will have to see how tuner cards evolve starting 2010. Since cablecards will be supported on a PC then (mainstream). I'm going to wait to see how this plays out, and if flash does become lighter on CPU usage then I wouldn't even think twice about getting one of these for an HTPC to do media playback (both web and from hard drive)
 
lilfleck said:
Another note, we will have to see how tuner cards evolve starting 2010. Since cablecards will be supported on a PC then (mainstream). I'm going to wait to see how this plays out, and if flash does become lighter on CPU usage then I wouldn't even think twice about getting one of these for an HTPC to do media playback (both web and from hard drive)
Click to expand...

The only problem with that is that cable companies have been less and less friendly to the idea of cablecard compatibility and even availability over the past few years. Remember when almost all new HDTVs were coming with cable card slots? Notice how almost no new HTDVs come with cable card slots today? There's a reason for that... Might also be why cable companies are not really in an uproar about Microsoft becoming more "lax" on who can install a cable card tuner on their systems...

Still, if anyone has experience using a USB tuner like this one:

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=3867990&CatId=4546

with this motherboard, I would be very intrested to hear the results of both watching HD and using PVR funcions as well.
 
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