Practical Performance in Windows 7

We have already investigated the performance of Nvidia ION platform in detail. Zotac ION-ITX-C mainboard is almost identical to the reference platform in hardware, with the primary difference in the support dual-channel memory instead of single-channel one. Therefore, we decided not to run the detailed performance benchmarks one more time, but to pay special attention to the performance of this mainboard in the new Windows 7 operating system.

For our tests we put together the following system:

• Zotac ION-ITX-C mainboard (Intel Atom 230 + NVIDIA GeForce 9300);
• 4 GB DDR2-800 SDRAM (2 x  2 GB, 5-5-5-15);
• Western Digital Raptor WD1500AHFD HDD;
• Delta ADP-90SB BB PSU;
• Windows 7 Ultimate x64 RC OS
• Drivers:
  • nForce Driver 15.37;
  • GeForce/ION Driver Graphics 186.18;
  • nForce HDMI Audio Driver 1.00.0.42.

One of the most stressed advantages of the Windows 7 operating system over Windows Vista is its ability to run flawlessly on “weak” computer systems. ION platform equipped with a single-core Atom 230 processor is undoubtedly one of these not very powerful hardware solutions. Therefore, it was especially interesting to see how the new Microsoft OS will behave on Zotac ION-ITX-C platform.

We have to stress right away that due to the optimizations of Microsoft OS core Windows 7 suits very well for computers built around Nvidia ION platform. Especially, if they have enough RAM. We used a 64-bit OS version for our tests, which should work just fine with 2GB of memory, according to the developers. Therefore, in our case, when we had 4 GB of DDR2 SDRAM installed into our system, we had no problems of any kind. Since more than 512 MB of memory is taken away by the GeForce 9300 graphics core, the applications has over 2.5 GB of memory at their disposal after the system boot up is complete.

Single-core Atom 230 processor working at 1.6 GHz frequency proved powerful enough to ensure sufficiently fast work of the Windows 7 interface. Microsoft’s minimal system requirements state that the system needs to be equipped with at least 1 GHz processor, so even from a formal standpoint Atom 230 can obviously be the heart of a Windows 7 platform. In the meanwhile, our previous experience shows that contemporary operating systems working on single-core processors may sometimes take too long to react to user’s actions, which occurs because the CPU is loaded excessively with system processes. In the meanwhile, we don’t see anything like that in Windows 7 running on Zotac ION-ITX-C: even though Atom 230 is a single-core processor, it supports Hyper-Threading technology, due to which it is detected by the system OS as a dual-core CPU.

Windows 7 installation onto a Zotac ION-ITX-C based platform went smoothly. After the installation is complete, you have to install additional drivers for the graphics core and core logic. Nvidia prepared very well for the new OS launch and all necessary drivers for Windows 7 are available on the company web-site.

Nevertheless, don’t count that Nvidia ION is capable of becoming a basis for a fully-functional system. Even the operating system gives Zotac ION-ITX-C the lowest performance index of only 2.2 (on the scale from 1.0 to 7.9). And the description of the results states that the CPU is not powerful enough and becomes a system bottleneck.

But despite that, all major functions of the new Windows 7 OS work without problems. Aero interface also works just fine, which is, in fact, not surprising: Nvidia GeForce 9300 graphics core is DirectX 10.0 compatible and performs fast enough. Also, a lot of software applications work just fine on a Zotac ION-ITX-C based system. Office applications, e-mail, instant messengers, Skype, simple multimedia applications – all these tasks work perfectly fine.

However, Nvidia ION based system demonstrates ambiguous behavior when used as an Internet terminal. News and other information sites even loaded with a lot of flash banners are no problem for a system built around Zotac ION-ITX-C mainboard. Although, we can’t disregard a frustrating observation: when you scroll down the pages with heavy graphics or resizing the browser window, CPU utilization jumps up to 100% and these operations are performed not as smoothly as we expect them to, from our experience with more powerful computer systems.

Another serious test for Zotac ION-ITX-C is fast consecutive opening of links in several browser windows or tabs. This is where you have to come face to face with insufficient processor power: at the fourth-fifth link the CPU utilization hits the ceiling and you can’t do anything else before the pages load completely.

Unfortunately, the above described difficulties occur in any browser, and not just Internet Explorer 8 included with Windows 7. Although they are indeed mostly typical of Internet Explorer 8, and show least of all in Firefox 3.5.1. Nevertheless, even if you install this alternative browser, you can only achieve acceptable web-surfing speed if you visit relatively simple web-sites and do not open too many windows and tabs.

Things are getting worse when we get to video playback through the browser. Even video playback on such sites as youtube.com, fox.com and abc.com becomes a problem. For example, it is totally impossible to playback HD videos in the browser on a computer built around Zotac ION-ITX-C mainboard: the CPU utilization hits 100%. In standard quality things playback ok overall, but to ensure that system doesn’t get overloaded, we would recommend you to close all other browser windows.

In other words, the owners of Zotac ION-ITX-C based systems will have to give up comfortable Internet surfing. At least until Adobe starts using Nvidia CUDA technology to accelerate Flash, which seems to be getting close: Nvidia and Adobe announced cooperation in this direction back at the last Computex show.

And in the meanwhile, the users of Intel Atom 230 based systems will have to forget not only about Internet video, but also about web-sites with dynamic flash-design or flash-based games. Here are a few examples: the corporate Nvidia web-site causes a 70% CPU utilization increase, for instance.

Popular multi-player tankionline.com flash-arcade loads a Zotac ION-ITX-C based system to its maximum and the fps rate drops to an unacceptably low level.

We see almost the same in regular 3D games. According to the results of our previous test session, a single-core Atom 230 processor is not powerful enough to handle contemporary games. And it is true not only for resource-hungry simulators, shooters or strategies, but also for some fairly simple multi-player role games, such as World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King or Lineage II: The Chaotic Throne.  The slow single-core processor again turns into the primary bottleneck, although on Zotac ION-ITX-C it stands side by side with a pretty high-performance integrated graphics core. And of course, this problem cannot be solved by switching to Windows 7.

So, looks like Zotac ION-ITX-C mainboard cannot become a good choice for a fully-functional system. However, you shouldn’t blame this particular mainboard or Nvidia ION platform in general: it is a common problem of all nettops based on a single-core Atom 230 CPU.

The Zotac ION-ITX-C that we received for review performs great in two cases: in applications that do not create computational load, or in tasks that can transfer this low from the CPU to the graphics core integrated into GeForce 9300 chipset. And in the first place this is HD video playback.

Integrated Nvidia GeForce 9300 chipset used in Zotac ION-ITX-C mainboard features special PureVideo HD engine that provides hardware acceleration of video playback in MPEG-2, VC-1 and H.264 (AVC) formats used for HD video content. Due to this peculiarity any software players supporting DXVA (DirectX Video Acceleration) can easily playback video in NVIDIA ION based system without losing a single frame. The peculiarity of Windows 7 in this case is that finally there is no need for additional software and codecs installation to ensure support of widespread video formats. The default software video player bundled with the new OS, Windows Media Player 12, has finally acquired support for de facto standard formats, such as DivX, XviD and H.264. So, Windows Media Center also supports these formats. So, new OS will save the users time and trouble with installation codec suites and additional players.

As you can see from the screenshot, during the playback in 1080p of the video recorded in H.264 format, the CPU utilization doesn’t exceed 20%, which indicates that hardware video stream decoding performed by the integrated graphics processor is extremely effective. CPU utilization is about the same during the playback of HD video recorded in other formats.

However, Microsoft Company that has opposed the spreading of third-party video encoding formats, has still left a few frustrating flaws in their Windows Media Player 12. For example, the new player version doesn’t support a popular multimedia Matroska (mkv) container. As a result, big share of downloaded video content cannot be played in Windows 7 without installing some additional software. As a solution to the Windows Media Player 12 issues with data processing in Motroska we could recommend a freeware version of Haali Media Splitter or one of the numerous codec packs.

Some video processing and converter utilities can also use the graphics processor to do their work. Zotac ION-ITX-C mainboard suddenly demonstrated a serious performance increase in these still few programs. For example, Badaboom Media Converter – a powerful video converter tool.

As you can see from the screenshots above, once the GPU has been assigned its duties (in our case it is ION), the utility converts video pretty fast barely involving the CPU at all.

Unfortunately, there are still quite few utilities out there that use hardware potential of the GeForce 9300 chipset to the fool extent. However, Nvidia is constantly working with software developers to make sure that this list grows bigger. However, keep in mind that the specifics of the GPU computational resources make it impossible for some algorithms to actually take advantage of them.

This is what explains why media content processing applications are the majority in the list above. And this is the reason why we shouldn’t really expect the general performance of ION platform to increase substantially as more calculations will be made in the GPU.

Summing everything up I should say that Windows 7 operating system is quite fit for Zotac ION-ITX-C based platforms. However, it is important to keep in mind that the Aton 230 processor integrated onto this board poses serious limitations to its functions. Therefore, this platform may be used without any issues only in a limited number of applications. First of all, we can certainly recommend it as a basis for a media center for work with multimedia content. Since most video processing tasks can be transferred to the GPU, the weakness of Aton 230 processor will be barely felt. In all other cases, especially if you intend to use the system quite diversely, we strongly advise checking out the Zotac ION-ITX-C mainboard modification with a dual-core Atom 330 CPU.