Asus Eee PC 1008HA "Seashell" Review


Benchmarks


 SiSoftware Sandra
CPU, HDD, Memory

SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices.


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The Intel Atom N280 (1.66GHz) fared fine in Sandra's CPU-specific test. As we've mentioned, it exhibited plenty of power for basic multitasking and very light-duty multimedia playback, but it's certainly not potent enough to push any serious pixels in 3D gaming. Overall, results here were as expected, just barely beating the 1.6GHz Atom N270 that has found its way into most netbooks these days.


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In the CPU multimedia testing, the N280 held its own when compared to the marginally slower N270, but it still looks weak when compared to chips found in full-size notebooks. These tests make us long for a seriously revamped Atom or at least the dual core version that seems to be a rare find these days.


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As expected, the Eee PC 1008HE didn't exhibit the strongest scores here. But really, would you expect anything different from a single 1GB stick of DDR2 RAM? Thankfully, Windows XP isn't too much of a resource hog, so 1GB provides enough headroom for most tasks.


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Our 160GB  Seagate Momentus 5400.5 5400RPM drive stacked up well against similar models in the benchmarks, but we did feel a bit of lag when booting up applications for the first time, particularly coming from an SSD-equipped Neutrino netbook.

To test multimedia capabilities, we attempt to play back a 720p WMVHD clip, a 720p H.264 clip and a 1080p clip.


Click To Enlarge; 720 H.264



Click To Enlarge; 720p WMVHD


Click To Enlarge; 1080p


On the Eee PC 1008HA, the 720p WMVHD clip was the only one that played back "smoothly." The 720p H.264 and 1080p files froze in place and refused to play back in what we would consider a "smooth" fashion.  Intel's GMA950 integrated graphics core doesn't offer full video decode offload from the host processor.  Part of the issue here could be CODEC optimization and the multimedia player being used but in reality, the out-of-the-box experience in this area was simply lacking, as expected frankly.


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