Taking apart the Ion 330HT-BD

We were keen to take a look inside Ion 330HT-BD. Much like the exterior, everything was very tidy under the hood. Asrock designed a swell cable system for delivering power and data cables to the optical and hd drive. Mounted higher up the motherboard we constitute a Seagate Momentus 5400.6 2.five" 320GB difficult bulldoze, along with the Sony Optiarc BC-5500S Blu-Ray combo bulldoze.

This bulldoze supports 2x Blu-Ray read speeds and 24x CD read speeds. The maximum write speed for DVD+/-R media is 8x and 4x for DVD+/-R DL and DVD+/-RW media, while CD-R media can be burnt at 16x and CD-RW media at 10x. The drive features a 4.5MB buffer with access times of 320ms for Blu-Ray, 200ms for DVDs and 190ms for CDs.

Autonomously from a dual-core Intel Atom 330 processor clocked at 1.6GHz and the Nvidia Ion graphics chip, we found a few other interesting components residing in the AMCP7A-ION motherboard.

In that location's a pair of DDR2 And so-DIMM slots populated with 1GB Elixir DDR2-800 modules for a total chapters of 2GB. Upgrading the Ion 330HT-BD's retention will have you doing abroad with this retentiveness and replacing information technology with 2 2GB modules at a cost of around $40 - $l each.

On the network front end the 330HT-BD uses the Realtek RTL8211C(L) Gigabit Ethernet controller along with an Atheros 802.11 b/g/n Wireless LAN PCI Limited One-half Mini Carte. Although the onetime uses the one-time PCI motorcoach, throughput won't be severely limited as there are few devices sharing it.

Asrock has also stuck with Realtek for audio, using their tried and truthful ALC890B 8-channel audio codec, while adopting the Nuvoton NCT6775F IC Asrock has achieved the EuP2.0 standard which indicates that the total Ac power consumption of the organisation is under 0.5W when turned off.

The Ion 330HT-BD is even capable of supporting RAID 0 and RAID1 when installing a secondary ii.5" hard drive. That's an impressive feature for such a tiny device. While Asrock didn't provide much guidance equally to how would one go about installing a second drive, we were able to work information technology out with a petty effort.

The drive in question must be mounted under the primary drive. However, in social club to do so the optical drive and primary hard drive will accept to be removed from the mounting subclass showtime. Asrock also included a cable that connects from a special ability connexion on the motherboard to the second hard drive.

Ultimately this opens the possibility of purchasing a pair of WD Scorpio Blueish 640GB hard drives, configure them for RAID0, and getting over a terabyte of fast storage inside the same little box.

The cooling setup is typical for an Atom organization. The CPU is cooled via a pocket-sized silvery aluminum heatsink. This heatsink is actively cooled via a tiny 25mm fan, while the Nvidia MCP79 chipset is passively by a much larger heatsink. This combination manages to keep the Ion 330HT-BD both repose and cool.