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With Intel's second-generation Atom platform hogging the budget space, NVIDIA's ION has seemingly been pushed aside - at least until the GPU giant pairs it up with Pine Trail, that is.

Nonetheless, there's still life in NVIDIA's existing ION platform and Taiwanese manufacturer ASRock has spiced it up a little by launching the world's first board to incorporate both the ION chipset and DDR3 memory support.

Dubbed the ASRock A330ION, the board, pictured above, features support for Intel's first-generation Atom processors - including the dual-core 1.6GHz Atom 330 - and sports dual-channel DDR3 memory slots supporting 4GB of RAM at speeds of up to 1,066MHz. Combine that with NVIDIA GeForce 9-series graphics, and ASRock reckons you have "the perfect ION platform".

Elsewhere, users will find a single PCIe x16 slot, 7.1 channel HD audio, Gigabit Ethernet, HDMI, DVI and VGA output, optical SPDIF, four USB sockets, four SATA ports and a duo of eSATA ports, too.

The use of DDR3 memory might nudge upward the cost of your build, but ASRock reckons the benefits are worth the outlay. We've yet to test performance for ourselves, but ASRock's internal benchmarks suggest a decent bump in performance when compared to an ION board configured with DDR2 800 memory:

No word on pricing or availability yet, but with Pine Trail out in the open, would you still consider an ION board equipped with a first-generation Atom CPU?

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