The Point of View ION 330 mITX motherboard

Now you've probably sifted though the photos already a tad better and spotted 4x SATA as well as SO-DIMMs, so let's have a look at the primary features of this little motherboard:

Well, we already walked through the back panel connectors, but for a product this size... that's a lot alright. The board incorporates a Realtek ALC662 chip, and it will give you 5.1 channels of audio. Three monitor connectors, mind you that the embedded GPU has a RAMDAC that can only utilize two monitors. So it's two out of three here. but still, that is majestic.

When we flip the board around we see the standard ATX power header. Also notice that the board is passively cooled. Now if you have no airflow whatsoever in your chassis, it is recommended to use the supplied small ventilator on top of the grey heatsink where the Atom processor is located. Under the copper-ish colored heatsink the GF9400 chipset from NVIDIA aka ION chipset is located.

This particular motherboard comes with SO-DIMM memory (DDR2) And that is both an advantage and disadvantage. The plus is that it is so dirt cheap to get. The negative side however is that SO-DIMM memory has slower timings than regular DDR2 memory and thus it makes it slower. I would have preferred regular DDR2 DIMM ports here.

One, two, three, yes four SATA II connectors. We just love that. If you plan to make this an HTPC, you could pop in say four times 1.5 TB drives and easily get it going at 6 TB. Or what about making your own little NAS server for file hosting huh? Low power, good performance. The sky is the limit here. And that really is the strength of a product like this.

It's not about high performance, it's about features and versatility. But anyway, let's look at performance anyway.