<p><span style="font-size: small;"> Last year one of the most exciting product combinations to grace consumer shelves was the NVIDIA&rsquo;s ION platform teamed up with an Intel <em>Atom</em> processor. The ultra-low power consumption, low heat output and ability to play HD video better than competing solutions of the time made it a difficult combo to ignore. Zotac took full advantage of this and successfully filled a niche demand with a slew of ION based products, offering various levels of plug and play functionality.</span></p> <p><span style="font-size: small;"> It was only a matter of time though before Intel would present us with something new and at the turn of 2010, <em>Clarkdale</em> was launched. In many ways, <em>Clarkdale</em> turned out to be the perfect successor to <em>Atom</em> + ION based systems by doing almost everything better. <em>Clarkdale&rsquo;s </em>IGP is capable of delivering high definition video and the platform also offers Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD-MA bitstreaming over HDMI - the latter a feature that eludes NVIDIA&rsquo;s ION. <em>Clarkdale</em> also manages to deliver a lot more grunt should there be a need for the odd file zip or encode and can also be used to deliver a decent gaming experience with the addition of a discrete GPU thanks to an on-die PCIe controller. To boot, all of this comes within a rather attractive power consumption curve thanks to comprehensive power gating.<br /> </span></p> <p><span style="font-size: small;">Naturally, Zotac jumped on the <em>Clarkdale</em> bandwagon, and pulled the first H55 chipset based mini-ITX motherboard out of the hat back in February this year. Since then, several motherboard vendors have followed suit, and we&rsquo;re at a point now where it makes very little sense to consider anything ION based for desktop use unless you&rsquo;re on a really tight budget. It&rsquo;s rather surprising then that Zotac are launching new ION based motherboards and media solutions today based around Intel&rsquo;s CULV processors.</span></p> <p><span style="font-size: small;">We&rsquo;ve got the IONITX-P-E model in house, and that&rsquo;s what we&rsquo;ll be looking at today.</span></p> <p><span style="font-size: small;">The IONITX-P-E teams up a 1.2GHz CULV Celeron SU2300 with the ION GF9400 chipset. The MSRP for the P-E model is $170, while the Pentium SU4100 model will cost around $200. The SU4100 based board is a built on retail demand only product, though. So we&rsquo;re not sure if you&rsquo;ll see it on sale at all considering the $200 MSRP. At the lower end of the scale, a single core Celeron 743 running at 1.3GHz should in theory appeal to uber-low power consumption enthusiasts.</span></p> <p><span style="font-size: small;"><a target="_blank" href="http://www.anandtech.com/show/3869/zotac-ionitxpe-can-intels-culv-processors-reinvigorate-interest-in-nvidias-ion">Read more...</a><br /> </span></p>