Point of View Ion 330 motherboard review -
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:
Processor | Intel Atom 330 - dual core 1,6GHz |
Chipset | Nvidia MCP7A-ION |
Graphics chipset | NVIDIA® ION GPU |
Audio chipset | Realtek ALC662 5.1CH |
Memory | Max 8GB DDR2 SO-DIMM |
Supported memory speeds | 667/800 MHz |
Graphics output | DVI/HDMI/VGA |
Audio output | Optical S/PDIF, stereo in/out |
USB connections | 6x USB 2.0 |
SATA | 4x |
LAN | 1x 1000 Mbps |
Expansion slots | 1x PCI-Express 16x |
Other connections | PS/2, Internal COM |
Form factor | m-ITX |
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.
Today a review on the ProTAB 2 XXL 10" tablet from Point of View from their Mobi range. With a price of only 169,- EUR the specs are decent enough alright. Interesting enough for graphics, the ProTab2XXL also comes with an additional MALI-400 3D graphics chip. Now we never heard of it before tbh, and very little can found about it on the web. But we can certainly measure it's performance and it does allow for FullHD playback. The Mali graphics chip even allows to drive a mini HDMI v1.4 port.
Point of View GTX 570 TGT Ultra Charged review
Today's offering is of course a GTX 570, we nicked it out of the Eindhoven warehouse from the good people at Point of View. See, their TGT team is chunking out several new SKUs based on the GTX 570. Today we'll have a peek at their Ultra Charged model. The UC version is a guaranteed stable factory overclocked product that is overclocked towards a pretty impressive value. See, the default core clock frequency of the GTX 570 is 732 MHz, the TC version is clocked at a blistering 810 MHz, which is a pretty decent overclock. Memory wise spot an increased clock frequency on that 1.2 GB GDDR5 memory as well, taken from 3800 towards 3960 MHz.
Point of View Ion 330 motherboard review
We test an ION 330 based motherboard - ION is a relatively low cost GPU assisted solution that will allow this industry on very short notice to have netbooks with full HD playback quality, in multi-channel HD audio. A solution that even supports CUDA and therefore some simple PhysX functionality, but since it's CUDA compatible, it'll also allow encoding and acceleration of popular video content. A platform that supports Gigabit Ethernet, dual-link DVI (high resolution monitors), acceleration in Photoshop CS4 and heck... you can even play a couple of games or make a mini HTPC out of it, it's just really interesting as the product might be little, yet offers a lot.
GeForce 9600 GSO 384 MB review | Point of View
NVIDIA replaced the GeForce 8800 GS with the GeForce 9600 GSO. The 9600 GSO is still based on the same G92 core with 96 stream processors that the 8800 GS has, but NVIDIA gave card makers a bit more freedom in their designs in terms of own PCB design to and determine their own clocks. This 'old' card will still have 384 MB of GDDR3 memory over a weird 192-bit memory interface. Cards like these will sell for less than 99 Euro, and considering the performance you get returned for that, you'll love it.