ASUS Eee PC 1201N Dual-Core ION Netbook Review

x264 HD Encoding and Blu-Ray Playback

x264 HD Encoding

According to TechArp.com, the x264 HD Benchmark is a reproducible measure of how fast your machine can encode a short HD-quality video clip into a high quality x264 video file. It’s nice because everyone running it will use the same video clip and software. The video encoder (x264.exe) reports a fairly accurate internal benchmark (in frames per second) for each pass of the video encode and it also uses multi-core processors very efficiently. All of these factors make this an ideal benchmark to compare different processors and systems to each other using what many are calling the next generation of the Xvid/Divx codec.

Results: The ASUS Eee PC 1201N again performs right were expected. The dual core Intel Atom 330 found in the 1201N was able to get better frames per second in the second pass to pull ahead of the Core 2 Solo processor in the MSI X340.

Blu-Ray Playback CPU Utilization

Since the ASUS Eee PC 1201N features NVIDIA ION graphics, we thought it would be nice to really push the HD video playback. We mounted a Blu-Ray ISO of Star Trek and monitored the CPU usage during the first chapter of the movie. Here are the results.

Results: The NVIDIA ION graphics in the ASUS Eee PC 1201N handled the Blu-Ray playback with no problem. Since the NVIDIA ION platform is a well tested platform for HD playback in Nettops, we didn’t expect this to be an issue. It was nice to see that the CPU utilization rarely got over 40% which means the ION graphics was doing its job to handle the HD content.