Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #24304 in Consumer Electronics
• Brand: ASRock
• Model: ION330/B/G/V1.0
• Platform: Windows
• Dimensions: 3.75 pounds
• Memory: 2GB
• Hard Disk: 320GB

Customer Reviews

Very Impressed
OK ..... I took delivery today of my shiny new ASRock ION 330 and I've now had a chance to set it up and have a little play.

I connected it via HDMI to my Sony Bravia 40" TV, connected to my wired LAN, plugged in a Keysonic USB wireless keyboard and installed Windows 7 x64, took approx 28 mins and all drivers were found automatically, except one (co processor), so a quick look on the supplied disk fixed that.

I then installed Media Player Classic/ffdshow and accessed my 1080p .mkv fileson my main PC, via the Network. I'm pleased to say that all of them played like a dream, as well as some 720p files, no stuttering or problems of any kind. The Nvidia ION certainly handles things nicely. It does exactly what it says on the tin and is very quiet.

I've added AVG, SuperAntiSpyware & SpywareBlaster and M$ Office, plus a few other bits and the performance is quite decent. Probably not ideal for video converting etc., but very adequate for most things.

So far I'm very impressed and haven't found any negatives, but I haven't been able to test any BluRay disks yet, as I haven't got a BD Drive to plug in, although I doubt this will be an issue, if PowerDVD Ultra is installed.

Great media centre unit using XBMC
I had been on the hunt for a new media centre machine for well over a year. My key requirements were it had to run XBMC - this is without doubt the best media centre software, it had to be extremely quiet, be capable of playing any HD 1080p MKV file and be as cheap as possible!

In the end it came down to two options - the Acer Revo 3600L or the Asrock ION 330. The Revo was selling for around £160 with Single Core Atom CPU, 1GB RAM and 160GB HDD while the ION 330 was £230 with Dual Core Atom, 2GB RAM and 320GB HDD. There are some other differences such as the Revo comes with built in wireless and a keyboard + mouse but I didn't care about those. Meanwhile the ION 330 came with a Slim DVD-RW drive - much more useful for installing O/S etc.

By considering the component costs of each unit the price difference of the ION 330 was justified and one last factor was that I needed a minimum of 2GB RAM but in order to upgrade the Revo you need to break the security seal which would invalidate the warranty. So, in the end I went for the ION 330...

Some points to note - if you want to playback HD video perfectly you need to utilise GPU acceleration. Essentially this means you need to use playback software that supports this feature (obviously XBMC is one of them). In terms of noise level the ION 330 is quieter than my PS3, and nobody would consider the PS3 to be loud.

A few criticisms - the ION 330 has a gloss black finish very similar to virtually any TV you can buy today and everyone seems to love this... but not me, gloss black = fingerprint/dust magnet and thus I have a preference for matt. Also it has 6 USB ports but they are all on the rear, it would have been nice to have at least one if not two USB ports at the front for ease of inserting USB keys etc. However, I have solved this by using a cheap USB extension cable/stand.

As for my setup I have it connected to an Onkyo TX-SR605 receiver using HDMI only for Audio and Video - video then passes to my Toshiba TV or Optoma Projector, wired LAN, wireless keyboard with built in trackball and IR receiver so I can use my universal remote. I installed Ubuntu Linux 9.04 O/S and then XBMC - it did take some fun and games to get everything working correctly and exactly how I wanted it but the end result was exactly what I was after.

awesome little machine
like the specs say it is silent. and not the normal IT "silent" - you literally have to put your ear on the case to hear the fan.

beautiful shiny case, there's no warranty-void sticker on it (unlike a lot of nettops) so you can open it up and tinker without worrying. the internals are very sensibly laid out and from a quick glance it looks very easy to modify to your needs. no sharp edges and a very sturdy design.
the backplane was out of alignment with the ports by about 1/2mm but this just means it grips the usb and hdmi plugs well so really it's a benefit in my books :)


i'm running XBMC on it on top of ubuntu 9.04 and it's the best media centre i could imagine!

using nvidia PPA and the VDPAU patches it plays 1080p video flawlessly and seemingly entirely on the gpu -- the cpus sit at < 10% usage whilst playing an 8gb mkv over the network meaning you can browse the web at the same time with absolutely no lag issues at all.

boots very fast, all the ACPI stuff etc works fine, nice big disk, audio over hdmi works great, all in all a very capable and powerful machine for its price and size.

i couldn't be happier with it.