ION2 are showing up

[mvallevand]

I see ION2's are on Newegg http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...-_-Product When you add memory, Win 7, drive (SSD would be nice) etc it's going to be over $400

Unfortunately it's still not a dream HTPC, with the faster Atom (in relative terms only) and the ION2 the original ION actually outperforms at times. http://www.anandtech.com/show/3702/zotac...-than-ion1

Martin

[pBS]

shame they went with the nm10 combo... until thye come up with a better chipset to couple with video, it'll be very limited in terms of extras..
very few sata ports/usb/slots/mem channels...
i'm extremely happy with my g45fc with a lowly 35w cpu..cheap, plays everything so far, stable..TONS of ports.. lots of flexibility..

found a g43 the other day with 5 sata + esata and 10 usb ports and pciex16 slot...
[btw,g41 is just as good as g45, just use software for 264, and even that's flawless on a celeron w/ffdshow software decode]

i have a feeling the ION2 needs another design go round before it'll really be what we expected...
[maybe pairing with a different chipset or cpu combo]
but it's still early in dev. cycle for these...

[ilovejedd]

The problem here is NVIDIA's trying to pair the ION with Atom and Intel doesn't like them doing so. Besides, the Atom platform is intentionally crippled. If you want better performance or more features, then Intel wants you to buy their regular desktop processors and chipsets.

Recently built the following:
In-Win BQ656 w/80W PSU, $55
Zotac GF9300-G-E, $120
Intel Celeron E3300, $40
Silverstone NT07-775, $20
Kingston 2x2GB DDR2 800 (on-hand, $35 at the time of purchase)
Seagate Momentus 5400.6 500GB, $70

boot: 50W
idle: 32W
load: 60W

It's not as small as some OEM ION solutions but it has fairly low power consumption and should perform more than twice as fast.