Power consumption

What about power consumption? A fine question dear Sir. Decoding 1080P content at this level must consume heaps of power right? Ehm, no not really. 10, maybe 15 watts. When the ION motherboard was powered up, it consumed 36 watts in desktop mode, idling. With the CPU stressed, roughly 45 watts.

Gear used:

• Point of View ION 330 mITX motherboard
• G.Skill Falcon 128GB Solid State Drive
• 2x 1GB SO-DIMM DDR2
• Optical DVD-RW
• 1200 Watt BFG PSU - a little overkill I know ;)

Once we decode a full HD movie at 1920x1080P... we end up at 46 watts maximum. And that's absolutely brilliant to observe. Bear in mind, we were playing around in Windows Vista. And it was fast enough for everyday functions. BTW would we have disconnected the DVD-RW then we could have shaved off some additional wattage, but I feel this is a fair real-world representable setup this way.

Temperatures

Last screenshot, we opted to test the ION motherboard completely passively. In an HTPC environment I want my gear to be silent. The downside is that the product does tend to get a little warm when passively cooled. Both the processor and internal embedded GPU peaked towards roughly 66 Degrees C (150 F). And while that is within a safe margin, it is a little on the high side. So we do recommend the usage of a little fan for some airflow.