teaguecl Wrote:If Shuttle is trying to make the XS35 passively cooled, would it be easier or harder to do with ION2 compared to the original ION?
I believe the answer is that it is harder to passively cool ION2, since it consumes more power and presumably generates more heat. If that is true, I'm worried. As far as I know, nobody was able to passively cool a first gen ION without doing some pretty extreme and expensive stuff with the case. Good luck Shuttle, we're rooting for you!
Not necessarily, let me explain why. An ION2 box contains 3 main chips:
- the 'Pineview' Atom cpu (10/13 Watts TDP)
- the NM10 southbridge (below 2 Watts TDP)
- the ION2 chip (13 Watts TDP)
so here the heat is spread over 3 chips while on an original ION box most of the heat was generated by one single chip: the ION chip, since the old Atom cpu had a very low TDP as it didn't include the northbridge.
You need to remember that the old ION was a northbridge (memory controller), southbridge (SATA, USB, etc controller) and a GPU all in one.
It's much easier to passively cool 3 lower TDP chips than one high TDP chip.
In fact there are several passively cooled
'Pineview' Atom + NM10 mother boards available and there are passively cooled Nvidia G210 cards available (equivalent to ION2), so combining these shouldn't be a mayor issue.
