Asus AT3N7A-I Intel Atom 330/Nvidia ION/FSB 533/2DDR2-800/GbE/HDMI/7.1-CH/BlueTooth Mini ITX Motherboard

2 comments

1. 

   Lewis W. on January 16, 2010 at 3:41 pm

   I bought this motherboard / CPU combo for an HTPC build over the holidays. As it was an HTPC build, key selection criteria included HDMI output, bluetooth and, of course, a very small form factor. Basically, that narrowed it down to mini-ITX and I decided to go with an ATOM / ION board, which gave me a choice between ASUS and ZOTAC.

   The board installed on the first attempt into a mini-box case with external PSU brick (not available on Amazon, unfortunately). The rig runs with dual 320GB laptop drives in RAID configuration and has 2GB of memory onboard. I loaded Win7 64-bit at the client’s request.

   Documentation provided is OK and the supplied CD-ROM has the required drivers. The RAID capability worked first time on the clean instal of WIN 7 and the performance monitor detected the 4 cores within the ION configuration automatically. I did contact ASUS customer support once by email – their response was timely, but factually incorrect (they told me that the board does not support RAID, when it does). In terms of negatives, I should point out that the WIN 7 index is relatively low at 2.3, down to the CPU score (although it had enough zip to handle the duties of an HTPC) and that it runs pretty hot (a known issue for the ATOM 330). Hence 4 stars not 5.

   The PC is now installed within my client’s home theatre set up and has no problem in providing 1080p via HDMI. I would definitely look at this board again for such a build.

2. 

   Valjean Clark III on January 16, 2010 at 6:27 pm

   I decided to build myself a low-power Media Center PC to act as a media file server, torrent server, and a DVR replacement. It works quite nicely for the most part, as the GPU can accelerate most of the more difficult movies. There are still some files it can’t quite handle (i.e. big mkv’s). It fits nicely in the Apex MI-100. I’ll summarize the good and the bad below:

   The good:
   
   -Low power (around 35W idle, 45W peak, or so the reviews say)
   
   -PCI slot (this depends on your application, obviously, but I wanted to pair this with an HTC Claro sound card, and those are PCI-only)
   
   -Overclocking (I currently have it at a modest 2.0 GHz, but I’ve heard of some getting as high as 2.2 GHz)
   
   -720p/1080p playback
   
   -Atom 330 is dual-core and has 64-bit support
   
   -Integrated bluetooth
   
   -Tons of USB ports
   
   -ION boards are inexpensive
   
   -Assembly is simple (no CPU or CPU cooler to mount)
   
   -Very low profile, if space is especially cramped

   The bad:
   
   -Higher idling power than other ION boards (Zotac’s to be specific)
   
   -Atom 330 is not much more powerful than the 270
   
   -No integrated wifi (may or may not matter, mine is hard-wired, so I don’t care)
   
   -The price of this board is a little higher than other ION products (although probably justified by Atom 330 and Bluetooth)
   
   -Cannot play some videos as well as I would like

   Basically, it is one of the faster ION platforms available, but I am still disappointed that it can’t crank out all the video formats I often play. Check the video formats you play and make sure the ION is sufficient. I really wasn’t well-versed in the low-power options available when I bought this. Since then, I have discovered the 9300 chipsets with the 775 socket. The total system cost will be a bit more ($20 more for a Pentium E5200, $70 more for a Core 2 Duo E7400), but you will have a system that isn’t so CPU limited. The idling power is only a few watts more, so to me it is worthwhile to not hit that nasty CPU threshold. I purchased a Zotac 9300 board as well for my car PC after doing more research, and it, paired with a Core 2 E7400, absolutely demolishes anything I throw at it.

   Basically, purchase this board if you are sure the Atom will not limit you in any way. Otherwise, like I said, only $20 more will get you a more powerful system.