ASRock NetTop ION 330

System Setup:

With the ASRock NetTop ION 330 we had no problems installing and running Ubuntu 9.04 (x86_64) on this system. The desktop LiveCD had run fine and installed to the SATA HDD. Besides lacking LM_Sensors support, all features of this computer had worked "out of the box" under Linux. Of course, with the NVIDIA ION, it is highly recommended that you install the proprietary NVIDIA Linux driver if you are interested in video or 3D acceleration or most any other GPU-related feature.

We began our quantitative tests using the Phoronix Test Suite and looking at its 1080p H.264 video playback performance. When running Ubuntu 9.04 with the Linux 2.6.29 kernel, X Server 1.6.0, and NVIDIA 180.60 display driver, we compared the performance of the ASRock NetTop ION 330 to the ZaReason Ion Breeze 3770 that is another NVIDIA ION nettop but uses the Atom 230 rather than the 330 model. We looked at the CPU usage when using X-Video and with VDPAU. The ASRock system had a much lower CPU usage when playing back the 1080p sample clip using X-Video compared to the ZaReason system, due to the true dual-core Atom being used. The ASRock system was able to play this video file using X-Video at around 20~25% CPU usage while the ZaReason system was around 50% or higher. When switching to VDPAU, the CPU usage for both systems was around the same since most of the work is offloaded to the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M GPU.

For the rest of our testing we compared the ZaReason Ion Breeze to the ASRock ION 330 using 20 different tests in the Phoronix Test Suite. These tests included the Enemy Territory: Quake Wars Demo, Doom 3, Lightsmark, Urban Terror, OpenArena, World of Padman, LAME MP3 encoding, Ogg encoding, FFmpeg, 7-Zip compression, LZMA compression, IOzone, SQLite, PostgreSQL pgbench, OpenSSL, GnuPG, C-Ray, Crafty, and dcraw.

The ASRock nettop was tested with its Intel Atom 330 CPU, ASRock AMCP7A-ION motherboard (MCP79-based), 2GB of DDR2 memory, and a 320GB Seagate ST9320325AS hard drive. The ZaReason Linux system had an Intel Atom 230 CPU, a Zotac MCP79 motherboard, 3.5GB of DDR2 memory, and a 1TB Seagate ST31000333AS hard drive. The NVIDIA ION (9400M) GPU in both had a core clock of 450MHz and memory clock of 1600MHz. With the ASRock system since it can be overclocked, we ran the dual-core Atom processor at 1.60GHz and then with its maximum overclock at 2.10GHz.