ASUS Eee PC 1005PE: Pineview Arrives

General Performance Hits a Speed Bump

PCMark starts us off with some interesting results: the 1005PE is actually slower than the 1005HA. Wait, is that correct? Well, as we've mentioned in the past, PCMark05 scores are a bit questionable as certain tests favor different OSes; normally Vista and Win7 have a clear advantage, but this is the first time we've tested a computer with Win7 Starter. Let's look at the detailed results before trying to draw any conclusions. We'll limit the detailed comparison to inexpensive long-battery-life laptops.

PCMark05 shows much of what we're interested in seeing. HDD speeds are pretty much all over the place, with some tests favoring one HDD and other tests favoring a different drive - basically, firmware optimizations on the drive come into play. In CPU intensive tests, the SU4100 in the EC5409u is the clear winner among the long battery life options. Conversely, the 1201N ION walks away with the GPU tests. The problem is that other tests show the N450 as slower than the N280; given the difference in OS, it's difficult to know what exactly is going on. The IMC of the N450 ought to make it faster than the N280 in all cases, so we're going to chalk this one up to Windows 7 Starter vs. XP.

We don't have any results for the older netbooks in Vantage since Vista/Win7 is required, so there's not as much to examine. What we do see is that there's some real wonkiness going on. The Memory score for example is about three times faster on the 1201N compared to the 1005PE, even though both laptops use DDR2-667 RAM. So yeah, PCMark Vantage doesn't really explain things any better.

In general use, we can say that the 1005PE feels about the same as other Atom netbooks we've tested, but we do prefer the Win7 interface - even if it is limited to Starter. Basically, you get the dumbed-down UI elements without all the fancy "Aero Glass" extras, but it's no worse than Windows XP in terms of the look.

Let's move on to some of our own tests to see if we can get any better idea of performance from the new Atom N450 relative to the N280.

The results in these tests are a lot more sensible: 1005PE is slightly faster than the 1005HA. The difference in most of the tests is hardly worth discussing (1-2%), but in the DivX encoding test we see a whopping 63% increase. This might be another Windows 7 vs. XP difference, as the 1201N performance relative to the 1005HA is a 120% increase, which obviously shouldn't happen if you just double the core count.

So which system would be best? In terms of general performance, CULV is hands-down the winner. Applications load faster and you can multitask better. Though the EC5409u comes with 4GB RAM, the Acer 1410 is still going to be within 20% of the performance offered and it's available for $420, making it a great option in place of Atom netbooks.

As far as Atom goes, ION is again the clear victor, since it can handle video decoding. 720p x264 decoding is possible using just a 1.6GHz Atom CPU, but you could do that with N270 as well; the issue is with other codecs and Internet content. Flash 10.1 (now in Beta 2 with updated beta NVIDIA drivers) works great on the NVIDIA GPUs; on GMA 950 and 3150, there aren't any DXVA hooks and thus Flash falls back to CPU rendering, which struggles at best. In fact, if you're a big Flash video user, particularly for HD content, ION will even beat the experience of CULV laptops. GMA 4500MHD is a big step up from GMA 950/3150, but it still falls short of NVIDIA.

Let's investigate the GPU situation a bit more.