Small Wonder: Zotac's HD-ND01 Nettop Review


PCMark Vantage

Next, we ran the test systems through Futuremark’s latest system performance metric built especially for Windows Vista, PCMark Vantage. This benchmark suite runs through a host of different usage scenarios to simulate different types of workloads including High Definition TV and movie playback and manipulation, gaming, image editing and manipulation, music compression, communications, and productivity. We like the fact that most of the tests are multi-threaded as well, in order to exploit the additional resources offered by dual and quad-core processors. We used the 32-bit version of the benchmark and defragmented the hard drive immediately prior to running it. The test was looped 3x.

One thing to keep in mind when comparing PCMark Vantage results is that the benchmark's margin of error can fairly wide—we'd estimate a few percentage points at least. Relevant factors include  whether or not the hard drive was defragmented immediately prior to the run and whether Vantage was run immediately following OS+driver installation, or only after a full suite of tests and other benchmarks had been run.
In order to generate the cleanest results possible, we tested Vantage immediately after OS installation and defragmented the hard drive immediately prior to benchmarking.


Futuremark PCMark Vantage
Simulated Application Performance




The Zotac nettop is in the lead by some 17 percent here, and the gains aren't all from the "gaming" subsection. This is actually the sort of test where the video card's ability to quickly refresh 2D images can also be called out on the mat—with an 8MB framebuffer and its weak integrated Intel GPU, Asus's AT3GC-I has trouble keeping up in multiple subtests.

Tags:  Nvidia, Intel, Nettop, Zotac, Atom

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