I’ve always found NVidia’s ION system fascinating, but it doesn’t get a lot of respect from most people because it’s so underwhelming compared to the GeForce & Quadro lines. But I find this new motherboard design from Giada just impressive.
Giada MI-ION2 motherboard features Intel Atom D525 processors,Intel NM10 chipset,NVIDIA ION2 board-based graphics card,512MB DDR3 memory.There are two DDR2 SO-DIMM slots supportng up to DDR2-667 memory,with mamimun capacity of 4GB,and the card employs two SATA2 ports.
It’s basically an entire computer in a box, for only $221. It’s not super-powerful, but add in some cheap memory and maybe a DVD player and an SSD, and you’ld have a pretty nice PCTV rig that has just enough horsepower to drive 1080p I bet.
via ION2 platform,Giada MI-ION2 motherboard,super-thin – Expreview.com.
The ION2 + Atom D525 + NM10 is a neat combination. I benchmarked CUDA on my Jetway Mini-Top last week: http://www.pixel.io/blog/2010/9/30/cuda-ion2-benchmarks.html
FYI, it’s identical to the Giada and comes with a case and remote. It periodically drops to $210 on NewEgg.