Now for some screenshots from CPU and GPU Z
You are sooo HOT!
Temperatures for the cpu reach mid to high 70s C after the 4M super pi test. They drop to mid to high 60s after one min of almost idle conditions. Ten min idle and the temps go to 63-64C. The ACPI temps reached a max of 61C and after 10 min idle 45C. The HDD as long as it is not used it remains steady at 40C while during HDD benchmarks it reached 46C. I am satisfied with these temps. (read further down, more info on temp under really heavy load...)
Joystick!
In other words, games! None of which playable with a joystick, hey it's my review!
Pirates!: using FRAPs and playing the steam version of Pirates! Max supported resolution
800x600. Full details on, advanced lighting off, shadows off, trilinear filtering ON.
During main map frame rate from low 10s to low 20s. During naval battle from low 10s to low 20s. During swordfighting from low 20s to low 30s. If you lower resolution and/or lower details you should get some boost in frame rate, but for me those numbers were good enough to play without feeling i was missing anything. The bigger boost was by disabling shadows and leaving advanced lighting to OFF.
Splinter Cell: Settings don't seem to affect much the fps in this game, which means either
that the cpu is what is stopping the game to reacher higher fps, or perhaps the game doesn't run that fast anyway. This is the third second time I install the game to any PC, the first was a 2002 notebook with the 7500m and P4m 1.7Ghz, that from what I remember the game was either not running at all or running very slowly. The other time was on a desktop system but I don't remember much about it. On this netbook the performance is good for this game.
The frame rate is between mid 10s to low 20s, at resolution 800x600 and 640x480, all details at max apart from shadow detail that only allowed the setting up to medium. The game looks good and plays good. Not sure how it would be if it was a fast paced game, but for what it is, you hardly notice any slowdown apart from watching the fraps number in the corner...
Locomotion: Game running at the monitor's native 1024x600 resolution. It runs without any slowdown at least for the first half an hour into the game, if things get very busy later on on a large map, there might be a problem, but since the minimum requirements are so low, I doubt it will be a problem.
Doom 3: I tried the game from 320x200 to 800x600 with all settings to minimum. I even
tried a "special" cfg file for the game, but the game is unplayable. It loads fine but
whenever there are certain types of light, for example as soon as you have control of your
character in the game, the landing pod that leaves Mars, or when you go inside the chamber for decondamination when you look towards the light coming from the fans on the ceiling, etc, the game drops from the otherwise 20-40! frame rate to low single digits. Considering how much lighting is used in this game I suspect that most of it will be like this, thus impossible to play the game and enjoy it. I am sure if I REALLY wanted to I could try to play with these ups and downs, but unless someone pays me to do so, I am not going to try.
I use the lated Intel driver for the graphics card. I am sorry to say but Doom 3 is not
going to be played on this notebook.
Oblivion: Does run without the use of oldblivion. Even then the game runs too slow to be
any fun. While the minimum frame rate is higher than Doom 3, it is constant and just
unplayable unless you manage to not do any fighting.
Command and Conquer Renegade: The game plays fine in single player, but online where things get more busy it struggles. I had to lower most of the details to minimum and resolution to 640x480 to get an acceptable frame rate when lots of troops appear/fighting. Even then it would drop to high 10s, that for a competitive FPs game (from 2002...) just plain sucks. I was getting better framerates in this game with my 7500 mobility. I can still play the game, but it is demoralizing if you think about it.
O-R-B- Off-World Resource Base: At 800x600 the frame rate remains in the 20s and 30s with all details on. It feels good to see a space based RTS game play on this computer. The game is a few years old, but it looks great on this small screen and it is a good game.
Space Rangers 2: Another space based game that runs fine. Unfortunately I didn't have the time to try the land battles yet (they have seperate graphic options), but I haven't seen
anything to make me believe the game will have a problem. The space based part is very
smooth with all details on.
Alpha Prime, with a lot of tweaking at the lowest settings available, the game plays ok, but
during firefights the frame rate from 30s-40s goes down to 10s, that is with a couple of
enemy on sight...In terms of performance, it can be played, but it won't be pretty,
performance or looks wise. There is a graphical glitch and some interactive panels and a
small rectangle in your HUD appear in white bright light, almost like the texture can't be
loaded. I might be able to fix it, but the performance is too low to want to invest any
time in the game, so I won't even try.
Command and Conquer (The First Decade). As expected, no problems with it. I haven't tried the other old RTs games of the series, but I expect they will run just as well.
Over the next days I will try more games and I will post the results here.
You can't touch this!
Multitasking with HD video...
While playing a SD music video (external drive A), had anti virus and firewall online, Opera
browser open with a couple of tabs and uncompressing a 8.5 GB rar file on external drive B, the CPU utilization reaches an average of 39% with variations to the low 30% and low 50s. 43 processes in total in the background with another 498MBs available memory. Not bad. Trying to play a Hd video file, while continuing with the previous processes, apart from the music video. CPU reaches 97% top, average 91%, very chippy visuals, good audio. All the above using mplayer classic with latest klite codecs. Using VLC doesn't help at all, perhaps even worse. With WMP11 it actualy resembles a movie although the sound is even worse. Turning off Opera it is still choppy with visuals playing at lower speed than audio.
It doesn't look like a codec issue with the player but simply performance issue.
Tried the same file after copying it on the desktop and not running much else, no worthwhile changes.
Tried a different, much smaller HD file, but at higher resolution (1080p instead of almost
720), same results only slightly worse. Unless I have problems with both codecs, it doesn't seem likely that this netbook can play HD files without issues. Perhaps with the right codec it might, but I have nothing else to try. I might try to change the encoding if
possible and try again. I do wonder though, if I could connect it to a monitor that could
display HD content (I don't have a VGA cable), would that take some load off the netbook or are the resources used for scaling the video negligible? I suspect if I could somehow gain another 20% performance it should be able to handle 720p video.
There is one beacon of hope. Currently installing a game through stardock central, while using Opera with 3 tabs and playing with MPC a 120MB file (external USB HDD). The file has the following specs
Video: DivX 5 1200x544 25.00fps 5083Kbps [Main 0]
Audio: Dolby AC3 48000Hz stereo 448Kbps [Audio 1]
If you want to consider this HD video, then be happy because it plays without a single problem. It looks great, it sounds great and CPU utilization while doing all the above and playing the file never reaches over 81%.
I will try to find/encode some other HD files and post my results.
Major issues
I don't consider lack of performance to be a major issue since this netbook is not supposed to be a desktop replacement. Bad performance with games was expected and HD video is perhaps not a lost cause yet. The is one major issue for me. The temperature of the CPU increases alot when under heavy load, for example gaming or multitasking. High 80s C with the top so far 91C while "playing" Doom 3. If both the system and the CPU can handle it, then it isn't a problem, but it does make me feel uneasy about it.
Give me some Juice!
Battery life with the 3 cell battery is less than stellar, but not very bad. Downloading/installing games over stardock central, playing (loop) a video file of SD and having Opera on for 20 min (during which time the CPU utlization reached 97%...I suspect an issue with Opera and this installation), the total battery life time was one hour and 40 min. Screen brightness at the automatic reduced level, CPU running downclocked at 1.3 Ghz. Firewall and antivirus running in the background.
For simple text editing or similar tasks, it could reach 2.5 hours. If you need more, you will need to get a 6 cell battery when they are out.
Conclusion
If you are looking for a second or third pc/laptop or a back up system just in case, this notebook is superb. Small, light and all things considered, good performer. At 399 euros it is not the cheapest out there, but for the specs it is good enough. If you paid 70-80 euros more you could get a 15.4" Intel Core Duo notebook with a X3100 and similar RAM and HDD. At nearly 2.5 times the weight and twice the size. If size doesn't matter to you, then to buy one such netbook is a waste of money. If you need a as small as possible laptop and don't plan on using it as your main/only PC, then this is a great purchase.
It is not a gaming laptop, you can play older 3D games on it, but don't expect much out of it. Not graphical demanding turn based strategy games and wargames are no problem with it. As are old RTS games. It is fine for emulating 80s systems too if that is your thing.
For office related tasks it is a good buy. If you plan on buying this for a teenager that likes computer games, don't, unless he/she already has a gaming console and wants to play some light old games on the PC among doing other things like, homework.
Final Grade: 4/5
Photos to follow.
