Posted 10/30/09 at 09:10:32 AM by Paul Lilly

It's pretty common for hardware vendors to artificially gimp their budget or lower cost parts. Take AMD's tri-core chip, for example, which comes with a core disabled that isn't necessarily bad. And who still remembers Nvidia's vanilla 6800 graphics card that came with 4 software-unlockable pipelines to transform it into a 6800GT? As it turns out, Nvidia may have taken the same software-based approach to its Ion LE platform.

Nvida's Ion LE sports the same 1080p HD playback capabilities as its pricier sibling, but in order to cut costs, LE kicks DirectX 10 support to the curb. But as MyHPMini forum member runawayprisoner discovered, his may be entirely software-based, and a quick driver hack is all it takes to get the regular Ion drivers to install.

All runawayprisoner did was is add Ion LE's device driver ID to the Ion drivers, and once he did that, they installed like a charm, DirectX 10 support and all.

Whether or not that means full DX10 support remains to be seen, but according to runawayprisoner, if nothing else DX9 gaming stands to receive a sizeable boost in performance up to 50 percent.

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Posted 08/05/09 at 09:07:01 AM by Paul Lilly

There was plenty of fanfare surrounding the release of Nvidia's ION platform, a DirectX 10-capable chipset that includes Nvidia's GeForce 9400M (MCP79) GPU coupled with either an Intel Atom or VIA Nano processor. But despite the ongoing buzz, Nvidia has introduced a followup chipset, the ION LE, with nary a peep.

News and rumor site Fudzilla got in touch with Nvidia about the new chipset and was told that ION LE is identical to ION except it only supports DirectX 9. Nvidia said the new SKU is designed specifically for Windows XP on netbooks and nettops and will only be offered to OEM markets.

No other details on the entry-level part are yet available, including which OEMs plan to build products around ION LE and at what price points.

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