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AT5IONT-I Deluxe gets naked, photographed

AT5IONT-I Deluxe gets naked, photographed

September 27th, 2010 in .PC Components .Products
Nick Holland
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I figured that between a cunning “AT5IONT-I” and “naked” we’d get a lot of people clicking back, because in our last titillating unboxing preview we’ve had a whopping 70 comments!

Unfortunately I don’t have answers to all the questions within the replies – like release date (although I’m still pressing for one!) – however I decided to get the board out again for some ‘glamour’ shots, which will hopefully fill in a few more details for some of you wanting to build a mini-system around this lovely little, truly silent motherboard.

AT5IONT-I-1
AT5IONT-I-2
AT5IONT-I-3

The AT5IONT-I Deluxe is a standard 17cm square – mini-ITX – and just 35mm high, including the heatsink, which itself has 3 heatpipes and is 14cm wide. The nice and shiny plastic end is there to protect blind fingers finding sockets, from the heatpipe ends.

The rear I/O ports take up the whole length of one end the board. They include 802.11n WiFi, PS2 keyboard and mouse (good for backward compatibility and some older IR remotes), HDMI, DVI, optical S/PDIF, two USB 2, two USB 3, eSATA, Bluetooth and 5.1 audio out. Basically, pretty much everything you’ll ever need.

AT5IONT-I-4
AT5IONT-I-5
AT5IONT-I-6

The two DDR3 SO-DIMM slots hug the end of the heatpipes that spurn out of the heatsinks base. They are soldered to a copper heatplate underneath that sits on top of the Intel Atom D525 CPU and Nvidia ION-2 GPU.

If you don’t want to use the Nvidia ION-2 hardware onboard the PCI-Express slot is open ended to allow longer 16x graphics cards or RAID card to be installed.

AT5IONT-I-7
AT5IONT-I-8
AT5IONT-I-9

On the non-Deluxe board the ATX socket replaces the DC-DC power hardware on the PCB and rear I/O. Here the molex plug on the PCB is for the extra power cable, provided in the box, to plug in and power a hard drive and optical drive (since there’s only two SATA ports anyway).

AT5IONT-I-10
AT5IONT-I-11
AT5IONT-I-12

Hidden underneath the heatsink is also the four Hynix branded memory chips that give 512MB of dedicated space for the GPU to use. This gives not only better performance but it also means no main system memory is used up for graphics purposes as well.

In all an interesting an certainly unique motherboard that’s packed with hardware. If you don’t need the WiFi and Bluetooth and want to use an ATX power supply, the non-Deluxe board is the one you want.

We’ll hopefully be back soon with a performance write-up and some temperature numbers for you all!

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  • ITX Monster

    Three things I hope works out.

    1. Memory compatibility
    2. Overclocking
    3. Release date

    Hopefully Asus can provide the community with all of these things as it seems that many buyers where disappointed with the support on the release of the non deluxe version. I am not going to criticize Asus more then that as they have done quality products in the past and I am sure that they will continue to do so. As for overclocking, I want to see how well the D525 chip and new ion2 (GT218) compare vs the N330 ion (9300m or was it 9400M), from my own experience the cpu can be pushed to 2.1Ghz, GPU 625Mhz Core / 1300Mhz Shader stable, the temps should be better with this board as Asus did a wonderful job with the heatsink! its bulky though they did what zotac couldn’t or chose not to.

    :)

    Keep us posted!

  • HaoWhye

    How much memory can be installed? 4 or 8 GB? I’m hoping for 8 otherwise I don’t see a reason to replace my AT3ION-I Deluxe for this one. Since they look similar in most ways.

  • http://techinstyle.tv Nick Holland

    It’s 4GB, because the limitation is Intel’s Atom D525 memory controller not Nvidia’s Ion MCP this time. I wouldn’t bother replacing the AT3ION-I – the Atom cores are the identical and the only real difference is DDR3 vs DDR2 support. Performance will likely be very close.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Joseph-Burns/39507597 Joseph Burns

    Do we have any sort of release date even being thrown around? I know you said that you do not have an exact one, but what about a quarter or such. I have been searching every permutation of “AT5ION-I” “MiniMax” “Deluxe” “Release” and “Date” I can think of and I have seen nothing from preliminary reviews done about the same time this was, and nothing new since this review. I sure hope it has not been scrapped :ph34r: What about support for onboard RAID 0/1 from the 2 SATA ports? RAID1 would be kinda nice for people that want a very integrated and lower power server solution. Finally, what is the probable ability for the graphics to push 1080P from a bluray? I have heard sketchy reviews of the ION2 and they all say something along the lines of “It works, but barely.”

  • Anonymous

    ASRock has a Nettop ION3D that uses the same D525/GT218 and supports 3D HDTV. Anyone knows if this AT5IONT-I will support that as well?
    I’m still looking forward to the release of the Deluxe version.

  • Anonymous

    I would like to see how the board/CPU/GPU performs as a HDTV receiver. Basically I would like to put a low profile DVB-S2 card in the PCIe or maybe attach one via USB, put in 4 GB of RAM (maybe 2 are already enough), use small SSD for the OS and a large (2TB) HDD for media. A Blu-Ray ROM-Drive could be connected via the eSATA. As software I would like to use XBMC on Ubuntu and if neccessary with a TV backend like MythTV. In the end it should be able to display fullHD via HDMI to a TV in 720p and 1080i and record it to HDD. It should also play Blu-Rays at 1080p as well as display other movies and pictures and play the audiofiles on the HDD (MP3 and other.
    This all I would like to control via the included Remote.

    If it could do all that it would be the perfect HTPC solution for a truely all-in-one device.

    From what I found in various forums and on different sites the ION2 should be able to help with all of this and the system should be able to do it all including scaling video. However it may reach its limits when deinterlacing 1080i.

    I have yet to find any real test of such a system and for this use. Most just speculate and in the end think the ION2 is almost an ION some test suggest otherwise and the dedicted memory may make a big difference.

    So I would be VERY grateful if you could run such a test.

  • Anonymous

    Hi Holly,

    ASUS are no longer making the A5TIONT-I Dlx unfortunately, but AMD’s new Fuzion mini-ITX (ASUS E35MI-I Deluxe) will do all you want above, plus, you won’t have to use eSATA as there are 4-5 SATA ports internally. The performance of AMD’s new E-350 CPU should be better than Intel’s Atom too.

    The only thing I’m unsure of is whether AMD linux drivers work in XBMC for video decoding acceleration yet. You’ll have to ask on XBMC forums whether AMD’s Catalyst drivers for linux give ‘UVD’ (universal video decoder) support yet.

    We’ll be doing our own preview on the E35MI-I Dlx soon, but Google the name after CES starts next week, because that’s when AMD/ASUS are launching the board.

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