Zotac's IONITX-A can deliver full Blu-ray performance. Just don't get the B version as that only comes with a single core Atom (Image courtesy of Techreport).

Just picked up this little tidbit from Techreport‘s review of the Zotac IONITX-A, suggesting that the advent of dual channel memory has fixed their Blu-ray playback issues. Of course non-GPU accelerated formats still suck the proverbial:

Back when we first tested the Ion platform’s Blu-ray chops, we found that playback wasn’t smooth with Nature’s Journey, a 1080i title we were playing back at 1080p. We were using PowerDVD, which is compatible with the GeForce 9400′s PureVideo HD decode block, so application acceleration wasn’t the issue. Instead, Nvidia said the stuttering we experienced was caused by the combination of the fact that PureVideo was only optimized for 1080p content and the fact that the Ion reference design had only a single memory channel. Apparently they were right, because the IONITX had no problem smoothly playing back Nature’s Journey or any of our other Blu-ray movies at 1920×1080 resolution over HDMI. In fact, CPU utilization only hovered around 30% during Blu-ray playback.

Thanks to its PureVideo HD support, PowerDVD also had no problems handling 480p, 720p, and 1080p movie trailers. The 480p and 720p clips even played back smoothly in QuickTime, which doesn’t make use of GPU acceleration. Our 1080p clip stuttered too much to be watchable, though. Speaking of stuttering, the IONITX proved incapable of handling HD YouTube content. That’s not terribly surprising considering how CPU-intensive Flash-based video playback seems to be.

They then go on to recommend the Zotac GeForce 9300-ITX WiFi with Socket 775 and PCI-E x16… which is indeed a tempting solution.

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