Asus Ion-Powered Eee PC 1201N Review

Name: Asus Ion-Powered Eee PC 1201N Review - Page 5
Brand: Asus

by Shawn Oliver — Wednesday, December 16, 2009, 11:00 AM EDT

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Gaming Benchmark (ET: Quake Wars)

HotHardware's Test Systems

Covering the bases

Asus Eee PC 1201N
Atom 330, 1.6GHz, FSB 533MHz
2GB DDR2
NVIDIA Ion
On-Board Ethernet
On-Board Audio
250GB Hitachi HD 5400 RPM SATA
Windows 7

HP Mini 311
Atom N270, 1.6GHz, FSB 533MHz
2GB DDR2-800
NVIDIA Ion
On-Board Ethernet
On-Board Audio
250GB Seagate HD 5400 RPM SATA
Windows 7

Asus EeeTop ES2002
Atom 330, 1.6GHz, FSB 533MHz
2GB DDR3-1066
NVIDIA Ion
On-Board Ethernet
On-Board Audio
250GB Seagate HD 5400 RPM SATA
Windows 7

Zotac MAG HD-ND01
Intel Atom 330
NVIDIA ION board
2GB DDR2-800
NVIDIA ION
160GB Toshiba HDD (5400 RPM, 8MB cache)
Windows 7

Acer Aspire Revo
Intel Atom 230
NVIDIA ION board
2GB DDR2-800
NVIDIA ION
160GB Toshiba HDD (5400 RPM, 8MB cache)
Windows Vista

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

OpenGL Gaming Performance

Enemy Territory:
Quake Wars

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is Based on an enhanced version of id's Doom 3 engine and viewed by many as Battlefield 2 meets the Strogg, and then some. ET: Quake Wars also marks the introduction of John Carmack's "Megatexture" technology that employs large environment and terrain textures that cover vast areas of maps without the need to repeat and tile many smaller textures. The beauty of megatexture technology is that each unit only takes up a maximum of 8MB of frame buffer memory. Add to that HDR-like bloom lighting and leading edge shadowing effects and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars looks great, plays well and works high end graphics cards vigorously.

So few netbooks have shipped with 2GB of RAM and an Ion GPU that we're forced to compare the Eee PC 1201N to a handful of Atom-based nettops that we've seen in the past along with the Ion-based Mini 311. Amazingly, the 1201N matches up quite well to even the nettops in the bunch, and it even beats the Aspire Revo. 17FPS may not seem like much (and it's not in the grand scheme of things), but it's just enough to make the game playable. If you were to strip the details down to "low" (they were all set at "medium/normal"), you'd get even better performance. The bottom line is this: the 1201N can handle some of yesteryear's 3D titles, albeit at lower resolutions and with details cranked down. For a netbook, that's pretty good.

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Tags: Nvidia, Asus, Netbook, Eee PC, Atom, Seashell, 1201n, eee pc 1201n

Asus Ion-Powered Eee PC 1201N Review

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Gaming Benchmark (ET: Quake Wars)

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