The main difference between the ION LE and Full ION is that the ION LE does not have DX10 support, in fact the hardware itself appears to be the same. Forum member runawayprisoner figured out that some settings could be changed (I won’t divulge just yet) to make his ION LE become “the same” as the FULL ION, for Free!

Its quite simple what runawayprisoner did, he took the device ID of the ION LE and put it into an .INF file, then installed that (all the details here)

Long story short: force the system to install ION drivers, and you get DX10 support for ION LE. I can’t say “full support” yet, but I haven’t found any DX10 feature that doesn’t run. Games also run but you have to switch them back to DX9 either via command consoles or other methods as DX10 mode for some games slow things down quite a bit.

What does this mean?

If you have an HP Mini 311 or any netbook for that matter with Nvidia ION LE, you can change it to perform as a FULL ION with DX10 capabilities. It took runawayprisoner’s WEI score in gaming from a 3.9 to 5.4!

Windows Experience Index score significantly improved!

NetbookChoice also added: Remember, you cannot play DX10 games on Windows XP, so to get the most out of this hack, you would need to install Windows 7. You also get a significant performance boost over the stock ION LE. runawayprisoner talks of a 50 percent increase in the GPU for some DX9 games.