Component manufacturer Zotac revealed back in March that it had plans for Ion-based platforms for Intel’s budget processor Atom. Zotac has announced several micro-ATX and Mini-ITX motherboards over the last year, which despite their small formats have been offering plenty of features, and the slim Ion platform and Intel Atom is just around the corner. The first solid details of Zotac’s Ion platform has appeared and the manufacturer will present two different models using Intel’s Atom processor.
Zotac IONITX-A-U and IONITX-B-E are different in two ways, the choice of processor and the power consumption that on the A-U model sits directly on the circuit board. The first platform uses Intel’s dual-core Atom N330 processor, while the B-E model has to settle for the single-core Atom N230 processor.
The NVIDIA MCP79 chipset and other specification are identical between the boards, meaning GeForce 9400 GPU that operate at 450MHz with 1100MHz shader clock.
The prices will be around $300 and $200 respectively when they appear in Japan, but whether Zotac will launch the boards outside Asia is uncertain. Similar platforms could become interesting alternatives for power efficient Media computers or storage servers.
