The latest generation of machines are adding new features and more performance, which will expand the market for low end machines.
#ASROCK ION 330 UPGRADE PC#
Low cost, low power Atom CPUs in small desktop cases (nettops) such as the Asus EeeBox 202 first became popular about a year ago, following in the footsteps of their mobile cousins, netbooks such as the Asus Eee PC range. It is just one of several interesting new nettops coming out now that will offer significantly more processing power, especially for video decoding, while still using little electricity. This combination manages to keep the Ion 330HT-BD both quiet and cool.The new Acer AspireRevo R3600 (Acer AspireRevo R3610-U9012) that combines a dual core Atom 330 processor with the Nvidia Ion platform was introduced at the IFA consumer electronics fair in Berlin in September. This heatsink is actively cooled via a tiny 25mm fan, while the Nvidia MCP79 chipset is passively by a much larger heatsink. The CPU is cooled via a small silver aluminum heatsink. The cooling setup is typical for an Atom system. Ultimately this opens the possibility of purchasing a pair of WD Scorpio Blue 640GB hard drives, configure them for RAID0, and getting over a terabyte of fast storage inside the same little box. Asrock also included a cable that connects from a special power connection on the motherboard to the second hard drive. However, in order to do so the optical drive and primary hard drive will have to be removed from the mounting bracket first.
The drive in question must be mounted under the primary drive. While Asrock didn't provide much guidance as to how would one go about installing a second drive, we were able to work it out with a little effort. That's an impressive feature for such a tiny device. The Ion 330HT-BD is even capable of supporting RAID 0 and RAID1 when installing a secondary 2.5" hard drive.
Although the former uses the old PCI bus, throughput won't be severely limited as there are few devices sharing it.Īsrock has also stuck with Realtek for audio, using their tried and true ALC890B 8-channel audio codec, while adopting the Nuvoton NCT6775F IC Asrock has achieved the EuP2.0 standard which indicates that the total AC power consumption of the system is under 0.5W when turned off. On the network front the 330HT-BD uses the Realtek RTL8211C(L) Gigabit Ethernet controller along with an Atheros 802.11 b/g/n Wireless LAN PCI Express Half Mini Card. Upgrading the Ion 330HT-BD's memory will have you doing away with this memory and replacing it with two 2GB modules at a cost of around $40 - $50 each. There's a pair of DDR2 SO-DIMM slots populated with 1GB Elixir DDR2-800 modules for a total capacity of 2GB. The drive features a 4.5MB buffer with access times of 320ms for Blu-Ray, 200ms for DVDs and 190ms for CDs.Īpart from a dual-core Intel Atom 330 processor clocked at 1.6GHz and the Nvidia Ion graphics chip, we found a few other interesting components residing in the AMCP7A-ION motherboard. The maximum write speed for DVD+/-R media is 8x and 4x for DVD+/-R DL and DVD+/-RW media, while CD-R media can be burnt at 16x and CD-RW media at 10x. This drive supports 2x Blu-Ray read speeds and 24x CD read speeds. Mounted above the motherboard we found a Seagate Momentus 5400.6 2.5" 320GB hard drive, along with the Sony Optiarc BC-5500S Blu-Ray combo drive.
Asrock designed a neat cable system for delivering power and data cables to the optical and hard disk drive. Much like the exterior, everything was very tidy under the hood. We were keen to take a look inside Ion 330HT-BD.
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