Zotac ZBOX HD-ID11 Review: Next Gen ION is Better & Worse than ION1
by Anand Lal Shimpi on May 6, 2010 3:51 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- Next Generation ION
- HD-ID11
- ZOTAC
- NVIDIA
H.264 Decode Acceleration
Of course the whole reason you opt for a NG-ION (or ION) box is because you want to watch high definition content. The GT218 GPU at the heart of the NG-ION supports full hardware decode acceleration of all H.264 content. You can watch Blu-ray or even ripped BD content using something like Media Player Classic Home Cinema.
Watching The Dark Knight in MPC-HC results in ~12% CPU utilization on the Atom D510 with NG-ION
My personal favorite thing to do with these ION boxes is to load XBMC and use them to stream content to the TVs in my house. You get a great UI, the ability to play virtually everything over the network and there’s even an iPhone app to act as a WiFi remote control for the box (which is necessary given that Zotac doesn't include an IR port). You don’t get TrueHD/DTS-HD MA bitstreaming support, but you can send 8-channel LPCM audio over HDMI.
XBMC in action on the NG ION
The NG-ION works in both capacities. Playing individual H.264 content under Windows 7 was fully hardware accelerated. Getting the XBMC Live image to work took some effort. While it'll install to the system just fine, getting audio working requires an update to the alsa driver that comes on the image as well as a bit of tinkering. After installing the XBMC Live 9.11 CD image to the drive, I followed these instructions to update the Alsa Driver with one slight change to the process:
1. download the script and save it somewhere
2. cd <your-download-dir>
3. tar xvf AlsaUpgrade-1.0.22.1-2.tar
4. sudo ./AlsaUpgrade-1.0.22.1-2.sh -d
5. sudo ./AlsaUpgrade-1.0.22.1-2.sh -s
6. sudo ./AlsaUpgrade-1.0.22.1-2.sh -c
7. sudo ./AlsaUpgrade-1.0.22.1-2.sh -i
8. sudo shutdown -r 0
For me, step #5 was critical in getting the process to work. Afterwards, I had to download and apply the patch mentioned here to get the GT218 GPU recognized. Finally I followed the last two steps made in this post and got sound working in XBMC.
I suspect that once we start seeing NG-ION boxes ship in the coming weeks some kind souls will make XBMC Live discs specifically for those machines so you'll be able to avoid this process.
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Swivelguy2 - Thursday, May 6, 2010 - link
A little typo right up in the title: "Next Gen is ION" should say "Next Gen ION is"shotage - Thursday, May 6, 2010 - link
I've been waiting for one of these to hook up to my HD TV. This looks near perfect, but the fact the flash playback sucks is going to make me wait. If Nvidia can fix it with an updated driver i'm off to the shop. Otherwise I'll be back... to curse Zotacjvdb - Thursday, May 6, 2010 - link
They raised the price again? if it's true, I'll wait for the shuttle.Roy2001 - Thursday, May 6, 2010 - link
I need to point out that Broadcom Crystal HD decoder has a 40Mbps limitation and Ion does not have. XBMC would report dropped frames with higher than 40Mbps bitrate. That said, BD spec is less than 40Mbps and you can hardly see > 40Mbps mkv files. But I have seen that. Even XBMC with CPU decoding has the 40Mbps limitation and drops frames with CPU utilization less than 70%.sucram03 - Thursday, May 6, 2010 - link
You've seen >40mbps encoded MKV's? Whoever encoded them must have done a horrible job if they're at 1080p. Nothing should have to be encoded with that high of a bitrate -- that's overkill.A 40mbps limitation shouldn't be a problem. One thing that isn't touched on here, though, is CUDA-enabled decoding, which removes pretty much all limitations on H.264 content when done with DXVA. With CoreAVC 2.0, you'll pretty much never have a file you can't play. That would be the nice thing about this new ION, being that it has VP4 PureVideo. But.. as some have already said, this platform is way too expensive for that usefulness.
mcnabney - Thursday, May 6, 2010 - link
I have the original Zotac ION HTPC and am relatively pleased with it. Added more RAM and upgrade XP to 7. The memory upgrade made it run much more quickly and moving to Win7 allowed Mediacenter usage (it is a DVR for an HDHomerun and recorded TV is automatically moved to my WHS box).Old ION $200 @ Best Buy
Win7 upgrade $50
Upgrade to 2GB $40
So under $300 complete.
compare to:
New ION $250
HDD/SSD $80
Win7 OEM $100
Now we are at $430 when complete. That is a LOT more money for almost identical performance.
Bateluer - Friday, May 7, 2010 - link
This is a poor comparison. The 200 dollar Ion system the Acer Revo R1600, is an Atom 230 based machine. Single core. The new Ion featured in the review is a D510, dual core machine. Performance won't be light years better by any means, but this isn't a good comparison.Still, if you already have an Atom 330 Ion system, there's no need to pick up one of these machines unless you have money to burn. Like the Pine Trial platform itself, NG-Ion falls flat.
mcnabney - Tuesday, May 11, 2010 - link
Why wouldn't it be a good comparison? Under the tests that the new ION does surpass the old (would more memory help the old one?) the difference is moving from 49% of the performance of a slow Core2 to 53%. So there is really a very slight difference in performance. But there is a very clear difference in cost. In fact, the original Zotac ION can be purchased for $170 now.sucram03 - Tuesday, May 11, 2010 - link
You missed the point of the poster. The comparison you're making is between ION2 and the original ION with Atom 330 processor (note the difference -- this is dual-core). The $199 desktop at Best Buy is an Aspire Revo1600, as the poster said, which does NOT have an Atom 330 dual-core, it has a single-core Atom 230. If you want to talk about performance, go ahead and take a look at the benchmarks again, instead now looking at that last-place ranking with the Atom 230 processor which falls short in every benchmark. Not by a huge margin, but enough to make a significant impact, which is exactly what that poster was trying to say.It was a very valid argument. Just make sure you're backing up your claims with solid proof, links, or other general information instead of throwing together $'s and manipulating the outcome.
shotage - Thursday, May 6, 2010 - link
This quote "Streaming high definition Internet video on popular sites such as YouTube™, Vimeo™ and Hulu™ render smoothly and flawlessly in full screen with the ZOTAC ZBOX HD-ID11 and Adobe® Flash® Player 10.1. Video stuttering is a faint thought of the past with the ZOTAC ZBOX HD-ID11 with NVIDIA® ION™ graphics technology."from Zotacs site: http://zotac.com/index.php?option=com_content&...
Obviously this is incorrect. Anand; maybe someone should tell Zotac? :p