Asus Ion 2-Powered Eee PC 1201PN Review

by Ray Willington — Thursday, July 29, 2010, 11:07 AM EDT

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Gaming Benchmarks

Performance with Half-Life 2 Episode 2 and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

Gaming Performance

To touch on gaming performance

, we chose two games that draw moderately on system resources, Half-Life 2 Episode 2 and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. We then ran a pre-recorded demo of each at a resolution of 1280x800. The resulting performance achieved is indicated in frames per second in the graph below.

Notice anything interesting? Probably not, and that's a shame. To say that the 0.06GHz boost and the jump from Ion 1 to Ion 2 provides just a minor bump in gaming performance is understating things. And again, the Atom N450 in the 1201PN is also a single core chip, versus the dual core Atom 330 found in the original 1201N. Of course, this is still a netbook, so we wouldn't ever recommend it for serious gaming. And at the end of the day, we did see minor improvements, but Ion 2 definitely isn't about to usher in full-scale gaming in the netbook. For that, we'd recommend something like Alienware's powerful M11x.