jessekopelman wrote:|Romeo| wrote:
I see that the Ion has a very similar heatsink, which gives some upper limits on how much power the whole thing can take.
Where do you see a heatsink? The pictures in the Anandtech article just show bare chips. I'm sure the Nvidia 9400M will have a heatsink in production versions, but a single-core Atom doesn't need one (although I bet production versions would go with a dual-core Atom).
Look harder
http://www.anandtech.com/GalleryImage.aspx?id=4819
That is the Ion with its heatsink, mounted on the daughter board. As I say, a typical Pico ITX heatsink covering almost the entire board.
|Romeo| wrote:On a slightly different note, I notice with interest thst no one has published (or possibly not got from nvidia) a picture of the underside of the Ion board. Which I find odd/interesting given that there's an expansion connector of some kind there.
Look at the
second page of the Anandtech article. Near the middle of the page there is a picture showing the top and front views with labels. The connection on the underside is the SO-DIMM socket.
From your comments, I wonder if you are not confusing some other product you've read about with the Ion . . .
I don't think so.
I am aware of the SODIMM slot being on the underside of the board in the Pico ITX specification. However if you look at the pictures of nvidias reference system design, you can see the Ion mounted on a daughter board (or "PICO ITX CARRIER CARD" as nvidia seem to be calling it). You can also see that DC in power socket is on the daughterboard, whilst the Ion has a standard Pico ITX power supply connector (if you can really call it standard, but regardless it's the 12 way 2mm connnector). However there is no such connector on the daughterboard for using wires (and why would you anyway).
Add to this all the connectors on the daughter board (VGA, audio, digital audio, more USB, the power button, the battery) and the fact that there is no connector on the top of Ion for a power button, power LED, reset button, etc. and it becomes very clear that there is a fairly substantial connector on the underside of the Ion in addition to the SODIMM slot.
Which can't be seen in the side view picture. If a picture ever surface of the underside of the Ion, it will show what I think will be a fairly substantial connector.
I am quite interested in this board, so have pored over all the information release to date quite closely.
[editted for one glaring spelling mistake]