ASUS Eee PC 1201N Dual-Core ION Netbook Review

PCMark05 and 3DMark06

PCMark05

PCMark05 is an application-based benchmark and a premium tool for measuring overall PC performance. It uses portions of real applications instead of including very large applications or using specifically created code. This allows PCMark05 to be a smaller installation as well as to report very accurate results.

Results: The ASUS Eee PC 1201N gets a nice boost in performance due to the dual-core Intel Atom 330 processor and NVIDIA ION graphics. Again, note the performance boost over the ASUS N10Jc with NVIDIA 9300m graphics.

3DMark06

3DMark 06 is still a popular standard in advanced 3D game performance benchmarking and is the latest version in the popular 3DMark series available to run on Windows XP. 3DMark06 tests include HDR/SM3.0 graphics tests, advanced SM2.0 graphics tests, AI and physics driven single and multiple cores or processor CPU tests and a collection of comprehensive feature tests to reliably measure next generation gaming performance.

Results: Here we see the N10Jc slightly out-perform the ASUS Eee PC 1201N in 3DMark06. This could be due to the shared system memory being used for the NVIDIA ION graphics. Regardless, the scores are pretty close with the 1201N expectedly having a higher CPU Score.

We did attempt to run 3DMark Vantage and PCMark Vantage since the Eee PC 1201N came with Windows 7 pre-installed. Unfortunately, the laptop does not support the proper resolution for this benchmark.