Background:
My storage box died (and that old proverb of "You can't take it with you" has since been proven false) a few weeks ago, and I am looking to replace the machine.

Questions:
How would you rate the performance of your ION in general? wrt gpugrid? Where did you get your ION?

Thanks.

Using an Ion is not worth the bother.
I managed to get a few tasks in on an Ion that had its CPU overclocked to 2GHz, but so many failed after a few seconds and some reported back too late that I pulled the system apart and rebuilt it.
I kept the SFF case with its 250W PSU, HDD, RAM and DVDRW. I am now using a Q8400 with a GT 240 as a multimedia/internet/crunching system - its attached to my TV by an HDMI cable. The Q8400 came with a low profile heatsink, and is fairly quiet, as is the GT 240. The ion was quite loud, as the tiny fan struggled to disapate enough heat from the chipset sized heatsink.
The GT 240 is the most efficient NVidia GPU (in terms of crunching performance per Watt), at least until next month. It is also cheap at about £65 to £85 (depending on RAM type and amount, factory clock settings). The Q8400/GT 240 system now uses about 150W crunching both GPU and CPU tasks, http://www.gpugrid.net/show_host_detail.php?hostid=55951