ZOTAC IONITX-B-E Intel Atom 230 1.6GHz NVIDIA ION Mini ITX ION Platform Motherboard/CPU Combo

Pros: Nice little Mini ITX board. I picked it up just to try out since it was on sale. The onboard graphics are superb. The CPU is okay considering what it was designed for. The BIOS is wonderful and setup is easy.

Cons: Maybe that it is a single core but knowing what it was designed for not really a con.

Other Thoughts: I was leary of no fan on the chipset but I must say even in the tiny case that I installed this in the temps remain within safe limits according to nvidia. I am using this as a console emulator box and it is perfect. I was pleasently surprised that even with the underpowered CPU I am able to run some of my favorite racing games like the early ones Need For Speed series(Underground runs great) quite well. I did the old 3DMark2001se benchmark and scored 6314 under default settings. This score was attained with the modest cpu overclock I did to 1.9 odd Ghz. The power consumption on this baby is amazingly low, I'm running it with a 60w pico power supply quite comfortably. If this was a normal purchase I would have picked up the dual core model but the price for this one was right. Plays 1080P video falwlessly, CPU stays below 20%.

Pros: Great little mobo, using with Mythdora 10.21 upgraded to mythtv .22. Using VDPAU allows for streming HD, both OTA and recorded content (Backend is a Zotac F-E).

Cons: None so far

Other Thoughts: It would be nice if the RTC battery layed flat on the mobo, it causes interferance with the COOLER MASTER Elite 100 RC-100-KKP3-GP Black Steel / Plastic MITX/MATX Slim Case Computer Case Flex ATX 150W, Active PFC power supply.

I was unable to use this mobo with that case based on how the power supply overlaps the mobo by about 1/2 inch and the RTC battery sticking up, had it been laying flat or located elsewhere, it would be a great case/mobo combo.

Pros: Great motherboard, setup with latest nvidia BETA drivers and flash 10.1 beta for good youtube and hulu playback. Runs nicely on Windows server 2002 R2 with aero desktop enhancements :)

Cons: none right now. A bit slow but was expecting it. Runs a bit hot.

Pros: Small, lots of frills, quiet, pretty fast, very low power consumption. I've installed this machine as my new router/mythfrontend/fileserver, it replaced an old Pentium III 600MHz machine. I used a Kill A Watt (which I also purchased on newegg) to measure the wattage of both machines to get an idea of how much power I am saving with the new machine. The old PIII consumed 50-60 watts, the Zotac consumes 20-30 watts.

Cons: Cheap quality, gets very hot without a fan. I checked the CPU/GPU/MB temps in linux using "nvidia-settings -q GPUCoreTemp" and "modprobe lm90 force_lm86=0,0x4c" with "sensors" to force the lm90 to work like lm86 [it works]. Without a fan the machine idles at 80c, with the small fan included in the packaging I see 53c. I hoped for a silent PC but will deal with the slight hum since I'll likely get more longevity out of it this way.

Other Thoughts: I'm on my second board at this point. I RMA'd the 1st one with NewEgg because the network port gave lots of frame-errors while trying to stream data (videos in myth didn't play smoothly). The new one worked great out of the box but after two days, two of the USB ports on the back and both USB headers died and don't recognize anything I plug into them now. I'm convinced that Zotac doesn't have very good quality inspection/control at this point. Unfortunately, I can't RMA this 2nd board with newegg since I cut the box and sent in for my rebate.

Pros: Runs ALMOST any HD video encode. Runs windows 7 pro x64 like a champ. Runs Ubuntu 9 great (with a little work). This is a great platform for Boxee Beta. Flash video plays almost flawless with 10.1.

Cons: It is a bit pricey. Can struggle momentarily on High bitrate h.264 content on Windows and Linux.

Other Thoughts: Before you bash this board's capabilities, make sure you are using a video player capable of video acceleration. A few good free ones include XBMC on linux or Boxee Beta on Windows. I ultimately decided on windows because I had an extra 7 license and it supports a few applications I run on it. If I didn't have most of the spare parts around and Newegg didn't have this on sale over the holiday season, I wouldn't have purchased it. An ACER Revo would have been much better suited for my front end needs because of it's size and noise levels.

Pros: Small
Low-power; easy on the electric bill
The bios can use USB flash drives as hard disks

Cons: When I bought this, it was listed that the board has a mini pci-e slot. So I bought a small SSD to go with it. It turns out that the mini pci-e slot DOES NOT SUPPORT SSD's. This was not mentioned anywhere in the product description.

At least newegg removed the slot from the listed specifications so people won't make this mistake again.

Other Thoughts: I use this in a home samba/web server. It mostly serves up the contents of my external hard disks over the network and some static html pages to the 'net.

I bought a second one when an old motherboard (old as in 2002) needed replacing, and it works well as a replacement for that (mostly doing day-to-day web browsing and e-mail.)

Pros: Plenty of video output and other peripherals. Nice overall

Cons: Plugs in back are a bit flimsy, but the idea is that you don't touch them much.

Other Thoughts: ION video drivers are a bit difficult to install on Linux. If you're looking to make a small HTPC, go for the dual-core option. Haven't gone into the BIOS yet. Fits perfectly inside a Rosewill RC-SIX-01.

Pros: Great for a super low power computer. Uses only 25 watts idling in my configuration. Installed easy.

Cons: Drivers on disk are not compatible with vista 64 bit even though the drivers on the web are. For installing vista it asks for raid drivers (if using raid). The disk does not contain the drivers so u will need to dload off web and put them n a flash drive.

Other Thoughts: If using raid, install os with the drive in single mode then use the raid controller software in vista to build the array. (software can be dloaded from the mobo website) It will then reboot and take over night to complete your raid.

My comp has a dvd-rw and 2 500gb laptop hd's mirrored. Also used 300 watt Seasonic 80+BRONZE PSU. the system runs at 25 watts with g15 kb plugged in with lights on. Uses about 32 under load. W/o kb it drops to 22 watts. I also used a gentle tyfoon fan which only has 16 cfm, but uses a tiny .2 watts. this sucker doesn't heat up much anyway.

Pros: NVidia graphics, HDMI and SPDIF outs, 2 RAM slots, NO fan. Good BIOS setup interface. With Ubuntu 9.10, everything fully supported out of the box. Nice board!

Cons: SATA only, no PATA. Using this for my HTPC front-end and DVD player. I had to buy a new DVD drive 'cuz my old ones were all PATA and this board only supports SATA.

Other Thoughts: Another reviewer wrote that he could not boot via USB. I'm using PXE (diskless) booting, but I had zero problems booting FreeDOS or Linux via USB stick. Also - only one PS2 port, and no floppy, but who cares!

Pros: The board worked great and is very well put together.

Cons: I did not receive any of my 3 rebates I sent to this company and they dont respond to their emails.