Like gaming? Move right along to the
iBuyPower booth, please. Want an unobtrusive PC that will feed your Hulu and YouTube HD streaming addiction? Say hello to the ZBOX HD-ID11. It's basically a desktop version of the same Ion 2 setups you saw announced on the mobile front
yesterday, and as such should provide flawless Flash 10.1 playback while occupying an
extremely lean footprint on your desktop.
Zotac has matched
MSI's Wind Box DE220 with its inclusion of a dual-core 1.66GHz Atom D510 CPU, though it obviously differs with its NVIDIA Ion 2 graphics subsystem that includes 512MB of dedicated DDR3 memory. HDMI 1.3a and standard VESA wall-mounting are expected extras, with six USB ports, integrated 802.11n WiFi, dual-link DVI, and a 6-in-1 media card reader covering the rest of your bases. Check out some 1080p playback on a similarly specced system
right here while you wait for pricing and availability to be revealed.
Update: We've heard directly from Zotac on the matter of pricing and we're told that the American MSRP will be
$209.99 ($239) for the barebones edition, which will require you to add your own hard drive, memory and OS.
Update 2: Zotac seem to have been a little too ambitious with the initial price they quoted and have asked us to correct that number upwards by 30 bucks -- MSRP is now expected to land at $239.
posted March 3rd 2010 9:40AM
Can someone tell me when is this coming out? Just today I was about to order the Acer Revo for a media hub.
@aaydah76 Expect it to show up in retail/etail in a couple weeks.
@ZOTAC Would love to know what's the latest on landing a release date? Another few weeks and I (along with many others by the day) will be forced to settle for an ION nettop rather than your ION 2 launch. What a pity (for you and for us). Are you running into bad bugs?
@ZOTAC Kind of annoying that you (Zotac) were actively monitoring and responding here, but as soon as the issue came up that you're way behind your promised release schedule, everything got quiet...
If it's anything like the Acer Revo, Nvidia's drivers will hold the hardware back. See "HDMI No Audio Ion" at your local Google.
I also have black level problems on my Win7 partition on my Revo 1600. Nvidia's a mess.
@YukYuk Looks like that problem was fixed back in October of last year. I actually did the google search. Did you?
http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=107314
Invidia seems to always eff it's OEM's. They seem to take no responsibility for their designed in products. On the other hand, I don't know what the financial terms of their contracts are.
The PC market is getting a little shifty in terms of their specifications and claims. It's beginning to look like the cell phone industry. I think the market needs a couple good consumer protection lawsuits to keep all the players honest.
Wish this was announced two weeks ago before I build an Atom htpc...
The barebone kit is a sweet deal!
Hopefully they have a motherboard with these specs released soon too. I was really close to buying a asus atom 330 motherboard to build an xbmc machine. I'm just not a fan of the case, or 2.5 hdd size(data) limitations and would love to kick my dvd player to the curb by adding one in my media center.
Been itching to build small, low powered xbmc for awhile now. Not sure how much longer I can wait to build it. When are these Ion2 motherboards going to come out? I want release dates!
The blue ring on the case design isn't anything discrete.
I'm betting on the new Shuttle box so far, but we will need to wait for some actual reviewing and benchmarking on these new Ion 2 machines, side by side. I guess for the people who haven't purchased earlier Ion's yet, I'm on hold for these.
Screw it. I'm buying 2. 1 for HTPC, 1 for ubuntu server (an always on NAS, torrent, webserver, media dump machine). $600 fully spec'd out for both? This is a very interesting price point.
Will this be able to do HD Audio (DTS-HD, PCM, Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD Master Audio) that IS NOT downsampled to 16bit / 48khz by hardware limitations?
I would like to be able to have at least 24bit / 96khz. Can this product provide this? What are the HD Audio specs please?
Zotac, can you comment on this?
Is it for sale now?
@kaja69 According to ZOTAC, in a couple of weeks. Mid to Late March I presume.
ASRock ION 330 FTW!
@ZOTAC: Availability in Europe?
I would also like to know when this is going to be for sale in Europe, specifically UK,
Im pretty much set on buying this, my zotac mag cant manage full screen flash video. The only downside i can see is the single ram slot. 2gig for windows 7 64bit is stretching it a bit and the price of a 4gb module is like £120, twice the price of 2x2gb.
Regarding the LED ring, on the previous model (zotac mag) it can be turned off in the bios. Its not in anyway bright or distracting tho, its pretty subtle.
Regarding HDMI sound there are no problems, its just muted by default in the OS for some reason, seen this on ubuntu and windows.
So ZOTAC tried to sneak in a SECOND price hike. Greedy.
Went on sale today at the Egg.