Nvidia has silently introduced what seems to be its second ION based product. The product is simply branded as ION LE and LE denotes the entry level product.

We’ve asked Nvidia about it and Igor Stanek , Product PR Manager EMEA ION/Notebook products has came back to us with the following statement.

“ION LE is SKU of the ION GPU that is identical to “ION, except it only supports DX9. This product  is designed specifically for Windows XP on Netbooks and Nettops and we are going to offer LE SKU just for OEM market. “

This makes perfect sense as Microsoft is probably going to charge the OEMs less if the product only has DirectX 9 driver and not the DirectX 10. Most of IONs are still going to be sold with Windows XP, but we are sure that some clients will like the fact that ION will also work with Windows 7 and have the capability on DirectX 10, but just not in ION LE version.

We expect to see some ION LE based products shortly, but Nvidia still didn’t officially talk about that.