Asus Eee PC 1001P: Our Favorite Netbook
by Vivek Gowri on March 16, 2010 11:30 PM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
Asus Eee PC 1001P: Performance Tests
As a preface to the performance benchmarks of the Eee 1001P, let me say this: Atom is still dead slow. The transition from Diamondville/XP to Pineview/Win7 Starter is essentially a wash, since you combine a marginally faster processor in Pineview with a heavier and thus slower operating system in Win7. Honestly, I would rather have XP on a netbook—any netbook. Win7 Starter is annoying and unsightly when compared to the "full" version of Win7 Home Premium and shouldn't exist in any corner of the market with its lack of Aero and the ridiculousness of a fixed desktop background. The capabilities of netbooks have not changed—you still can't play HD video or HD flash without ION or a Broadcom HD chip, and you can't really do much more than run a word processor and a browser simultaneously.
For those of you who noticed that the 1001P's hardware specs are exactly the same as the 1005PE and expected similar benchmarking results, you're spot on. For those of you expecting the first true netbook offering decent performance, feel free to keep waiting. (I exclude the 1201N, since it has the dual-core desktop variant of the original Atom processor. It's an interesting experiment, but not a real netbook in the conventional sense.) The 3DMark results are pretty much level with the 1005PE, while the PCMark tests actually show an increase. The slight differences come mainly from newer, more mature drivers from Intel and potentially a faster hard drive. Regardless, the performance tests are mediocre across the board, which by netbook standards is about par for the course.
If you're still wondering about gaming performance, let's try to put things in perspective. The GMA 4500MHD found in current CULV designs is wholly inadequate for anything more than Spore or The Sims 3, and even then you'll need to run at low resolutions with minimum detail. And as bad as the 4500MHD is for gaming, it's two to four times faster than the GMA 3150! That's not even getting into the fact that most games take an eternity to load with Atom and 1GB of RAM. So don't worry about gaming on a Pine Trail netbook and you'll be a lot happier.
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Taft12 - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - link
Has anyone made a netbook since the Dell Mini 9 (owned and loved by me) that has no moving parts?This should be a design decision netbook makers should strive for, but I don't even know if anyone has even managed this feat since Dell did 1.5 years ago.
tlbj6142 - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - link
"Honestly, I would rather have XP on a netbook—any netbook. Win7 Starter is annoying and unsightly when compared to the "full" version of Win7 Home Premium and shouldn't exist in any corner of the market with its lack of Aero and the ridiculousness of a fixed desktop background."Why does this bother so many people? With a 10" screen do you ever even see your background? I know on my 15" laptop, I never do.
Areo has a couple of nice features (alt-tab layered look), but most are annoying. Especially the blurry "see through" window borders.
The real advantage Win7 has over XP is readyboost support. A $20 USB makes a world of difference in performance. Even on a 64-bit dual-core machine with 4G of ram.
straubs - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - link
I find the very suggestion that "memory over USB" is somehow faster than extremely fast DDR3 memory connected directly to the motherboard to be completely preposterous.SunSamurai - Tuesday, March 23, 2010 - link
That is completely preposterous, so its a good thing no one in their right mind ever suggested that.Replace DDR3 with Hard Drive and thats what its for. It's suppose to supplement the hard drive to provide less thrashing the pagefile.
Its still crap, and all it is is a buzzword selling point for dbag sales people in the tech department to toss around at consumers. Its almost as bad at them adding dual-core Ghz speeds together to come up with 5Ghz when really selling a 2.5Ghz chip.
Toss these people in jail or fine them please!
nubie - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - link
I think you completely misunderstood the point of readyboost.Flash ram has much lower latency than any physical medium (IE spinning disk)
Thus if you intelligently cache the OS and some apps to Flash you can mask HDD latency, and probably improve on hard disk caching by allowing flash cache.
Hard drive latencies have a large effect on lag issues in a low-ram computer.
strikeback03 - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
Suppose that is a good point, has anyone tested Readyboost in Win7 to see if it is useful yet? I can't, I run Windows off an X25-M so I'm sure it is faster than a flash driveTaft12 - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - link
What bothers people is the unnecessary crippling and step backwards from the "antiquated" Windows XP. We should be moving forward, not backwards.Also, Readyboost was shown to provide almost no benefit except in contrived benchmarks back in the Vista days and I doubt things have changed since.
mschira - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - link
I am not giving away my eee 1000h,It has a nice factory build in button to overclock to 1.8Ghz - effectively the fastest Atom CPU around, and boy it needs every single Hz it can get.
Asus overclocks the CULV platform, why not Pineview?
2Ghz? where are you?
M.
synaesthetic - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - link
Using ASRock's OCTuner utility, I've seen people overclock the HP Mini 311 (N270, nvidia ION) to 2.4GHz stable without a serious impact on battery life (lose one hour at most).I still haven't seen anything to make me want any other netbook more than the HP Mini 311, purely due to the presence of ION and the ability to increase clock speed by 50%.
QuietOC - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - link
This sounds like the best current netbook. I can't understand why anyone puts up with the garbage LCDs. I didn't know how good my 1000HA was until I got a 11" CULV. I agree the Atom should be clocked at 2GHz--which works on the Eee PC 1000 series. Intel actually does offer one Atom model rated for that speed but it is not Pineview.