News - ASRock A330ION board fuses NVIDIA's ION with DDR3 memory

[HEXUS]

The perfect ION platform, says Taiwanese manufacturer.

Read more.

[Methanoid]

Extra SATA ports - good, not the first Ion with 4+ ports though
5-10% Graphics boost - great but with PCIEx16 you could put a proper card and why bother when its got Atom CPU?
PCIEx16 - fine, you'd be mad to put a discrete VGA with Atom but at least you can use a PCIEx1 card in this. PCI still has a wider choice of non-VGA cards though

I'm underwhelmed really

[chis]

Might be worth waiting until ASRock arrange an updated version of the "new" Atom. They have a tendency to make "v2" editions of products...

[cjs150]

I can see a use for this as the board for a proper Window 2008 server for home use (email server, file server for streaming media files) - add in a RAID card using the PCIx16 slot and it looks perfect

Only problem is that VIA have just launched something that looks perfect for that (dual gig lan as well). Any chance of reviewing that to see if it is any better?

[miniyazz]

PCI-e x16 is a much better choice than PCI IMO - as pretty much anything (feel free to point out anything that isn't) that's available in PCI can be had in PCI-e x1, with the added bonus of increased speed (necessary for RAID cards especially) when needed, not to mention future-proofing as the sun is setting on PCI.