Intel ATOM 230 versus VIA Nano L2100 – Battle of the Mini-ITX Platforms

HD Tune v3.10

HD Tune Pro 3.10 is an extended version of HD Tune which includes many new features such as: write benchmark, secure erasing, AAM setting, folder usage view, disk monitor, command line parameters and file benchmark.

Benchmark Results: The Western Digital VelociRaptor was used as a secondary drive on both systems and the results were nearly identical other than the burst rate and CPU usage! Both boards averaged 101.5MB/Sec when it came to the transfer rate and had ~7ms access times. The burst rate on the Intel Atom 230 based board was ~12MB/Sec higher and the CPU usage was lower, which is a good thing. The VIA reference board with the Nano L2100 processor running at 1.8GHz was used more for this benchmark. The same hard drive on a ATX platform with current chipsets had a burst speed of 179.4 MB/s, so these mini-ITX boards do take a performance hit since they are using older chipsets. The VelociRaptor hard drive is still impressive on these boards though.