Asus Eee PC 1005HA Seashell Review


Benchmarks


 SiSoftware Sandra
CPU, HDD, Memory

SiSoftware Sandra (the System Analyzer, 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 tasks and 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 1005HE didn't exhibit the strongest scores in the memory bandwidth department. But really, would you expect anything different from a single-channel configuration with only one 1GB stick of DDR2 RAM?



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Our 160GB Hitachi Travelstar 5K320 (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 1005HA, the 720p WMVHD clip was the only one that played back "smoothly." The 720p H.264 and 1080p files froze in place occasionally, dropped frames, 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. If you'll recall, we experience the exact same results on the 1008HA. 
 

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