ION platform for desktop?

[Stark]

I'm looking at getting my parents a new desktop; they do absolutely nothing other than typical nettop tasks (like email, watching flash video on tourism sites, that sort of thing). I've looked at some benchies and the performance of the atom 330 seems easily able to handle this sort of thing.

My question is regarding the pre-packaged ION offerings. They've got a nice case, and the ION-ness means they've got some tiny bit of GPU going on, but in AU they are priced such that I could build a low-end desktop for the same price (they're about AUD$530). My parents have been using various older computers for some time now, so the Atom would be at parity or perhaps even a performance boost. They're never likely to fill the 120-160Gb drive they come with (as they all have laptops anyway). The desktop is just for very basic Windows-only tasks.

Are there any other price-point parts like this? Is it worth the price premium for a pretty, pre-built box that doesn't take up so much space/power? Does anyone have any experience with these kind of implementations?

[DaveJB]

Well, if you really want a system that's as compact as possible, then the only real competition that an ION box would have is a compact barebones system from the likes of Shuttle, and the ION would easily win out there - going by UK prices, just the barebones kit itself for a decently up to date Shuttle system would cost more than an entire ION box, before you even add the processor, hard drive and other things to the equation.

However, if you're willing to step up to, say, a MicroATX case (which can still be very compact) then the ION's advantage is much less pronounced. For the same price, you could easily assemble a Pentium Dual Core or Athlon 64 X2 rig, which would be significantly faster than the ION in any measurement you care to give, while still having relatively low power usage. I assembled such a rig for some relatives myself last year, and it was very quiet and fast in operation (and bearing in mind this was with a 65nm Pentium DC and Windows Vista - a 45nm processor and Windows 7 would be even faster and possibly quieter still).

Really, it all depends on just how important the compactness of an ION system would be to you/them, and whether it'd be worth the trade-off in speed.

EDIT: Just checked the prices on techbuy.com.au, and the price of the latest Shuttle LGA775 system works out to AU$373. So, not as much of an advantage as it would be going by our prices, but the overall system would still be more expensive when you added a processor, optical drive and hard drive to the equation - plus it only has G45 graphics instead of ION graphics, so you'd lose out big-time in that department.

[Ace Pace]

One word of caution to ION boxs is that currently, most Internet video is not accelerated by the GPU. If your parents watch youtube or any movie site, you might hold off on that. However, nearly all local media is accelerated.

This about sums up the downsides to an Ion Box, along with the fact I'm not sure how well an Atom would run Windows 7 (which I assume you are planning to install). It won't be bad, it just might not be a good experience. I don't recall if there are any dual core atoms + Ion boxs, but if so I would steer there.

Heat/Power, yeah, Ion box fulfills it's goals there, those things are pretty quiet.

[Stark]

I'm well aware that for the AUD$500 for an ION box I could just build a real computer (especially since my old C2D box/PSU/HDD is at their place anyway). Given how little they use their desktops (preferring their MacBooks) I just can't be fucked. I'm looking at the dual-core IONs, and I figured with the 2gb RAM they'd be able to handle WIn7 fine (since my friends use Win7 on netbooks with less RAM). And hey, I'd like to dick around with one.

In the benches I saw for the ION they generally compare it to the Athlon X2, which I didn't think was really a fair comparison, but if I get an attack of effort that would be efficient.