Zotac IONITX-A-U Atom N330 Dual Core 90-Watt PSU WiFi ITX Intel Motherboard
by Zotac
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Our Price: $299.99 Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $169.00 (click here) Category: CE See more product details |
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Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Zotac IONITX-A-U Atom N330 Dual Core 90-Watt PSU WiFi ITX Intel Motherboard
Customer Review: Momentary Lapse In Judgment, "I Had a Zotac Moment!"
Summary: 1 Stars
*SIGH*
I was excited to receive my first ITX board ever. I have believed boards could have been this small for quite some time but the manufacturers just didn't have the demand. From the looks of it that will be changing!
Being new to the mini-ITX form factor, I didn't think it would matter if I bought an 'off brand' model. This board rocked in at 189 clams with Atom dual core processor and had middle of the road reviews, so it must have been good, right?
Like a squealing child on the-non-denominational-holiday-that-Santa-covers, I flung open the packaging and carefully extracted my SPARKLY, sleek looking ZOTAC board protected in protective tint-wrap. I observed that it was lovingly cradled on it's underside with anti-static foam. I was feeling pretty good about my off brand.
I wasted no time and, while observing grounding practices, assembled the mainboard. It amazes me that peripheral hookups (monitor, keyboard, mouse) are truly clumsy interfaces that will be the next items needed for miniaturization.
After booting to Ubuntu and installing, here are my johnny on the spot observations:
* This ZOTAC board did not survive 12 hours of burn in.
* My first inkling of suspicion was that the printed circuit board was slightly sticky. This tells me there was a lack of attention in the curing phase and possibly no burn-in.
* ZOTAC's Atom processor is alright, but was sluggish handling a basic Ubuntu OS.
* The BIOS did not identify a USB as a boot device, but booted from a thumb drive quite admirably.
My experience can thusly be summed up in the comment my wife so aptly stated as, "I HAD A ZOTAC MOMENT!" This means, of course, when you get the urge to buy an off-branded piece of equipment, you are probably correct to assume you ARE taking a risk that you are buying cheap crap (not inexpensive crap which is a completely understandable pursuit). I can't say this board was either of those, but the processor was included so hey, it was a party in a package so I couldn't resist.
I handle a modest amount of PC building, but in retrospect this is only the 3rd bad moboard I have witnessed in 15 years right out of the box; two were Dell OEM and one was an ABit refurb so it makes me wonder what ZOTAC's excuse might be (I'm listening). I distrust technology to the fullest extent allowed by law, so this failure was expected and planned for. I will be assembling an Intel mini-ITX board with a Core2Duo this next weekend. Win.
All of this and I asked, "Was all of this worth the trouble for a recipe kiosk in the kitchen?" To wit, my Ego replied, "Don't make me make you buy another ZOTAC." I capitulated.
<3 Amazon and their return policy.
-KG
Customer Review: Great Board from Great Series with minor USB Issue
Summary: 4 Stars
This was my second Zotac IONITX board. I purchased this to use in a small-format case without any moving parts.
The assembled system is enclosed in a M350 case (from Amazon and elsewhere) and uses 4 GB of Ram and a Sata-to-CF adapter and Compact Flash card for storage (both Amazon). There are no moving parts, so a cool storage device was important.
The board was stable when overclocked to 2.01 GHz, a trivial exercise with the Zotac. If you type the board number into a search engine you can find lots of overclocking details. Proceed at your own risk. I brought it back to factory speed for temperature concerns. I run another Zotac IONITX at 2GHz all day with a small (included) fan with no issues.
Now my one issue with this series from Zotac is the AMI BIOS. There seems to be a bug in the BIOS related to USB. When you connect through a switch or a hub, the system searches for USB Controllers and attempts to initialize USB Hubs outside the system itself. In my situation, I connected it to an IOGEAR KVMp switch (which contained a two-port USB hub) and also to a Rosewell USB hub (through the switch). During boot, this Zotac series pauses at the "Initializing USB Controllers" message for 30-60 seconds. That's an unpleasant wait on such a system, and if that's all the issue was it would be okay, probably. But, there's more.
After building the system, it was necessary to install the operating system from a USB device, either a thumb-drive or a DVD player. Both methods worked up until the point when you wanted to do the actual install, and then the system froze. You were left with a blinking cursor in the upper-left of the screen until you power-cycle the box. The workaround is to remove the external hubs from the system and allow the box to only discover its internal USB hub. Once I did this, things were fine. Adding the hubs back later seems to again delay the boot, but I have less need to copy large files so I'm not sure if the problem that stopped the install is still there.
This USB issue is all that stops me from giving this board five stars. I have four mini-ITX machines, two based on Intel reference motherboards and two on Zotac. I love the Zotacs. The fact that this unit has the power cube on the power cord and not inside the case makes for a much smaller form factor when used without a DVD player. If you intend to use a DVD, you might have trouble finding a case that leverages this power supply form, and you might consider the Zotac IONITX-E-U, which does not have a power supply included (and has a PCI slot, too).
The combination of the Zotac IONITX-A-U and the M350 case is awesome. Totally.
Good Luck!
Customer Review: Potentially awesome product but has issues
Summary: 2 Stars
Pros:
+ small
+ no noise
+ packs everything into one small package
+ wireles N built in
+ a lot of inputs and ports
+ works ok with windows 7
+ detached psu
cons:
+ seems to have issue with booting from hard drives. It takes me multiple tries, sometimes, just to boot to OS (this is after all the updates and patches)
+ had issues with the board not sending video signals to any of the video ports (hdmi, d-sub, etc) had to return it and amazon awesomely sent me a new one really really fast.
+ the 2nd board did not have video issues but both boards do seem to have trouble reading from hard drives when starting. (specific example, when I press "power" button, the screen stays blank, and hdd light does not blink either, I see nothing on the screen until I press the reset button or shut down by holding the power button and restarting it - I had not found this issue in forums as of yet, maybe it's just my hard drive (?) but when it boots it works fine. )
+ included HDD sata cables are very short and I had to use extensions / changing location of the hard drive
+ CAN NOT PLAY HD files - it's very jittery and very annoying to watch on my 55in LED tv. other types of files work ok. - I even installed codec and tried to find ways to play blueray / HD grade files but very laggy overall.
found this awesome article at tom's hardware
[...]
which talks about how this particular system isn't good enough for HD.
rather, it suggests a nvidia 9300 chipset which would obviously perform better than nvidia ion, with dual core cpu over 2ghz.
Please read the reviews and see what other people wrote before purchasing this product.
I personally would not buy from zotac again since there's lack of consistency in their product's performance. It is just not of high grade. You expect things you buy to perform at fairly consistent level every time you use it (like you'd expect an ipod to play music files flawlessly every time you play it, and it certainly does)
Customer Review: Just Not Enough for use as an HTPC
Summary: 3 Stars
The IONITX A-U isn't as good as its successor, the IONITX F-E (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002TKVK1M?ie=tag=a52-20&ie=UTF8). While the A-U comes with a 90 Watt PSU, it does not have PCI-E slot (the slot which is essential for adding a TV capture card). Other than that major lacking, the board is a well-designed board that worked great for what I could do with it. Needless to say, I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out a way to incorporate a TV capture card, and failed on all fronts.
While users who have digital cable can use the HDHomeRun (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0010Y414Q?tag=a52-20&ie=UTF8), we on the other hand only have analog cable. Therefore, it needed to work with my current TV card (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001E2T6Y4?tag=a52-20&ie=UTF8) which supports analog cable signals.
CASE
I used mine with this APEX case (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000WCQYU6?tag=a52-20&ie=UTF8), which works quite well.
MEMORY
The best memory to grab for any of these Zotac boards are either the Crucial XMS. Go for the 2GB (2 x 1GB, http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000CDLCGG?tag=a52-20&ie=UTF8) if you don't intend to ever watch Blu-Ray movies: (or) Go for the 4GB (2 x 2GB, http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000TPXULC?tag=a52-20&ie=UTF8) if you DO intend to watch Blu-Ray movies.
Hope this helps! :)
Customer Review: IONITX-A-U
Summary: 3 Stars
Well I purchased this Motherboard last week.. I had order all the parts I would need to get started building a Media-Center.
Good: The Motherboard had no problems handling XP - Win7 32 -64 BIt. Fast and runs very quietly. Bought a larger case to support the Three 1Gig drives. On board HDMI, Optical Audio both were a major points for me.
Bad: Ok with XP64 - Win7 64 audio not functioning had to load all kinds of drivers and still had issues. Finally went to XP all drivers installed and function looked great on my 46Inch LCD. But playing MKV files were a problem Video sputters and has issues. Tech group on their website states to upgrade BIOS to fix. But very limiting on how to complete this task as all you have to boot from is a CD Rom. Following their instructions and sites they recommend was useless. I have places a ticket with the CO on a better solution on BIOS update and possible fix for the MKV issues. If nothing within 24 Hours will be return to Amazon for another type of motherboard.
Note: You can not boot from USB so have to have a Sata or Estat CD / DVD Rom handy.