ASUS Eee PC 1005PE: Pineview Arrives
by Jarred Walton on December 21, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
Much Better Battery Life
So far, there really hasn't been any reason for us to recommend the 1005PE over the older 1005HA - and by extension, the new Pineview Atom N450 didn't show any benefit over Diamondville N280. Even Silverthorne Z530 beats N450 in some areas, since it has support for H.264 decoding, though overall we're not very keen on the Atom Z series. Finally, though, with battery life we get to see some improvements.
We need to make a note here that these are very much preliminary results. We like to run multiple battery life tests, but with just two days of testing there wasn't enough time to do more than a single battery life test. We will update this page with additional battery life tests as we complete them, which may take a few days. We also want to rerun the Internet test once as a sanity check - the score below might be slightly lower than normal since we didn't have a chance to condition the battery by doing a full cycle prior to testing. Okay, that said, here are the results of our one battery life test.
And finally we have a reason to get an N450 system. This is a relatively intense web surfing scenario, as we have multiple Flash ads visible, and yet the 1005PE still lasts nearly 10 hours. Granted, this is with the higher capacity battery (less expensive 1005PE models will ship with a 48Wh battery instead of a 63Wh battery), but the same battery capacity in the 1005HA only managed just shy of eight hours. As you can see in our relative battery life chart, the N450 improves on the closest competitor (the 1005HA) by 27%.
Update #1: We just finished the results for x264 playback, and it continues the pattern of dramatically improved battery life. The 1005PE lasts over 6 hours compared to over 5 hours on the 1005HA, which is a 20% improvement. We had to use the CoreAVC decoder for both systems, naturally, as otherwise x264 decoding is too demanding. Dual-core Atom can handle 720p in software, and with CoreAVC it can likely do 1080p as well; the single-core parts on the other hand struggle at 720p without a highly optimized codec. CPU usage with CoreAVC is still around 75-85%, and we had to run with the Balanced power profile and Active cooling to keep playback smooth. (We're not sure why setting a laptop to Passive cooling makes a difference, but CPU usage was pegged at 100% and we lost A/V synch if we used the Passive setting.)
Update #2: DivX 720p HD playback results are complete as well, and this time the battery life increase isn't quite as substantial: 9% more battery life than the 1005HA. Obviously, DivX decoding isn't quite as stressful as x264, but the real deal is over seven hours of HD video on a single charge. Remember that this is 720p content downscaled to a 600p LCD as well; if you had lower resolution videos (i.e. encoded to 1024x576 for example), the CPU requirements would drop a bit more and thus increase battery life slightly. We're now looking at the ability to watch four typical movies without the need to plug in, so that's definitely nice if you're interested in watching movies on long flights.
Update #3: Wrapping up the battery life results, Idle battery life tops out at just over 14 hours. That's the same as the UL80Vt in ultra-power-friendly mode, but then the UL80Vt has 33% more battery capacity. Compared to the 1005HA, the 1005PE boosts idle battery life by 38%, but biggest gain we've seen. It's not too surprising, as the 45nm process now extends to the "Northbridge" and IGP whereas those two items used to be 65nm parts (and the Southbridge used to be 90nm). It's unlikely you'll reach this lofty 14 hour run time if you're actually using the 1005PE, but you should be able to get 12+ hours doing basic document editing (assuming you're not playing music in the background).
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JOEyGADGET - Friday, January 29, 2010 - link
I bought a 100PE thinking I could use eeectl to boost the screen brightness to the ultrabright setting the way I boosted the brightness on previous ASUS netbooks. However eeectl ultrabright setting has no effect. Anyone know how to force the 1005PE to turn on or activate ultrabright setting? At its brightest setting the 1005PE is simply too dim for my eyes. Suggestions welcome and appreciated. Thanks, JOEyGADGETProDigit - Tuesday, December 22, 2009 - link
I totally stopped reading after page 4, where the results became opposite of tomshardware results, and opposite of logic.The memory controller is on chip, and yet it's slower than a separate?
Don't make me laugh!
Really, for benchmarks you don't need to be with anandtech, for they just paste some stupid numbers there that won't make any sense whatsoever!
Then again, tomshardware is only interested in running 3D mark and Crysis tests!
whatthehey - Tuesday, December 22, 2009 - link
You, sir, are a moron if you are going to compare the THG article with this one. Unless I'm mistaken, the only Pine Trail article is this one:http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/atom-d510-d510...">http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/atom-d510-d510...
See the problem? One, they're testing D510, not a netbook. Two, they don't have results for old Atom N280 and new Atom N450. Three, you're trusting THG, a site known to have sold out on too many occasions to even begin to count, just like HardOCP.
Which results in this article are wrong? PCMark is all over the map, which as they point out is pretty much par for the course. Don't trust PCMark05, and there aren't any meaningful points of comparison for Vantage. They would need to show other netbooks with Windows 7 Starter, and they don't have that here.
In short, to be "opposite" of some other site, they actually have to compare the same sort of hardware. AnandTech has a separate D510 article, but D510 isn't a netbook. Looks to me like the N450 has no reason to be faster. Same cache instead of the desktop, where the D510 has twice the cache size compared to 330.
Please take the THG trolling and go elsewhere. THG ceased to be relevant right around the time that Thomas Pabst stopped being the head honcho.
foolsgambit11 - Tuesday, December 22, 2009 - link
It looks like in the next couple years, we'll see Atom-derivatives relegated to MIDs and CULV-derivatives taking it's place for netbooks/nettops. I think this was Intel's stated objective for Atom from the beginning, right?geok1ng - Monday, December 21, 2009 - link
The very simple reason that Pineview sucks soo much is that Intel want to push the crappy GMA 3150 and the sluggish 4500HD down our troats. Another point for the Asus UL80vt, Dell 14z, Ions. The consumer cant have both products:a good GPU and a good enough CPU.Fanfoot - Monday, December 21, 2009 - link
I'm surprised that Intel had the GMA 500 core available to them, yet the GPU they've paired with the N450 is still so anemic. The battery life is certainly nice, but the inability to play HD Flash is seriously questionable.piroroadkill - Tuesday, December 22, 2009 - link
GMA500 is a decent product with godawful driver supportShadowmaster625 - Monday, December 21, 2009 - link
Sempron M100 is lurking about out there. And I cant find much of any info on it. Can you guys try to find and review a Sempron M100 notebook with HD4200 graphics and a decent size battery? If you do can you play around with underclocking/undervolting it?JarredWalton - Monday, December 21, 2009 - link
I've been trying to get *any* of the 45nm AMD laptops. I'll continue working on it, as I'm quite interested in seeing what they can do for power reqs. Turion II Ultra + HD 4200 seems like it should at least be competitive with dual-core ION (i.e. ASUS 1201N), but I'm not sure AMD is going to get power requirements down low enough.MamiyaOtaru - Monday, December 21, 2009 - link
"When Intel released the Atom CPUs, netbooks received a dramatic boost in performance and battery life"Battery life, yes. Performance, not so much. In single threaded apps, the Celeron was faster than the Atom. Overall, having that second thread was nice, but raw performance wasn't helped so much