ion le comparison

A lot of folks have been worried about the performance of the NVIDIA ION LE chipset. In a nutshell, NVIDIA ION is what you get when you bundle an Intel Atom processor with NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics. ION LE is what you get when you disable DirectX 10 support on the same chipset. But Blogeee reports that’s pretty much the only difference.

Blogeee compared the GPU-Z readouts for an Acer Aspire Revo 3600 nettop and a Samsung N510 laptop. The former has NVIDIA ION graphics while the latter has ION LE. Basically both showed the same figures for clock, memory and shader sped. The Acer computer has 256MB of video memory while the Samsung model has 128MB, but that’s likely because the Aspire Revo has 2GB of RAM while the Samsung N510 has just 1GB.

In other words, if you don’t need DirectX 10 support, you should be fine with either chip. On the other hand, if you do plan to play some games or run other programs that require DirectX 10, you’ll probably want to stay away from the ION LE.

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5 replies on “The difference between NVIDIA ION and ION LE? Not much”

  1. “…The Acer computer has 256MB of video memory while the Samsung model has 128MB, but that’s likely because the Aspire Revo has 2GB of RAM while the Samsung N510 has just 1GB.”

    Yeah, but ‘likely’ doen’t cut it.

    Why couldn’t they test apples with apples? I mean what’s the point of a test where they don’t even try to level make an assessment based on a the test-bed? This just “Yeah, like dude, like we were like foolin’ around and stuff and like we noticed this thing…”

    1. Because as far as I know there’s not a single computer on the market
      that comes with a choice of NVIDIA ION or NVIDIA ION LE. There are no
      apples to apples yet unless you build a system from scratch, and
      manage to get your hands on a motherboard that can handle both
      versions.

  2. Well that’s not so bad. I don’t see why DX10 would be removed. Was DX10 support removed so it could meet whoever’s definition of a netbook? Most DX10 games wouldn’t be able run on Atoms anyways and some games even scale back to DX9 support. Right?

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