ASUS N10JC: the Netbook Goes Corporate
by Jarred Walton on December 24, 2008 4:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
Battery Life and Power
We will start with measurements of power use with the laptop plugged into the wall. Keep in mind that some power saving features are not fully functional unless you are running on battery power, but it's still interesting to compare power requirements with other laptops under similar conditions.
We see a significant drop in power requirements relative to the ultra low voltage Core 2 Duo U9500, especially when we disabled the 9300M. In best case scenarios, we should see almost twice the battery life for the same size battery capacity, and at worst battery life using the GMA 950 should still be 50% better. Even with the discrete graphics enabled, battery life should still be better than the U2E by a decent amount.
We don't have results for all of the test systems under each test scenario, but probably the most interesting performance metric is going to be battery life while surfing the web. There we see that the N10JC just manages to edge out the new Apple MacBooks, nearly matching the U2E with a 9-cell battery. That's great for Windows performance, but unfortunately you need to keep two things in mind. First, the Apple MacBook line is still offering better battery life relative to battery capacity. Second, the same MacBooks all offer quite a bit more performance -- in most cases they're at least twice as fast as the N10JC. That's the bad news; the good news? The ASUS N10JC still costs half as much as the cheapest MacBook, which definitely works in its favor.
One other item we have to address is the video decoding performance. x264 playback totally failed to stay in sync when we tried to watch a movie using just the CPU. We still ran the 720p battery tests, but if you want to watch such content you will need to enable the 9300M. We used Media Player Classic Home Theater (WMP-HC), following this guide, and didn't experience any problems. CPU usage dropped from 80%+ with noticeably delayed video to under 20% with no discernible synchronization problems.
We should also mention that system temperatures and noise levels on the N10JC are great. Temperatures never got above 32°C during testing, and the fan rarely kicked up to higher RPMs except during extended stress testing or gaming. We could not measure noise levels above the threshold of our SPL meter (30 dB).
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ATWindsor - Wednesday, December 24, 2008 - link
Please continue to test the displays of laptops. This is very good information, and often not tested by other sites.Clauzii - Wednesday, December 24, 2008 - link
I'd like to see the ASUS with the Mac battery. That should bring a whole day of interrupted usage to the table. Besdides that, I think I'd prefer a dual core Atom and no discrete GPU, since the dualcore Atoms CAN decode movies well.Oh, and a Merry Christmas from Denmark :)
JarredWalton - Wednesday, December 24, 2008 - link
Glaedelige jul til dig ogsaa! I don't think dual-core Atom would do all that well with H.264 1080P, but it might manage. I suppose the real question is whether it would be more power efficient than the 9300M or not. No one seems to be doing Atom dual-core laptops yet (though I'm sure they're out there -- just no one has offered to send one for review). As for the Mac batteries, they're actually *smaller* than the ASUS battery in terms of capacity; OS X just seems to do better at optimizing for power as far as I can tell.therealnickdanger - Wednesday, December 24, 2008 - link
But would you be kind enough to maybe test a couple old games like Half-Life 2, Counter-Strike Source, Halo, WoW, UT2004? Merry Christmas, AT!JarredWalton - Wednesday, December 24, 2008 - link
Given the performance in UT3 and CoH, I'd expect pretty reasonable frame rates in the games you mention - maybe not at high detail, but medium shouldn't be a problem. Let me see if I can dig out HL2 and give it a run for old time's sake....therealnickdanger - Wednesday, December 24, 2008 - link
Fair enough. Thanks for considering it! ;-)Penti - Wednesday, December 24, 2008 - link
A XP Home laptop is not a business version, why not test the Vista Business version? Would be more interesting to see how the VB N10J-A2 fair.A VB laptop with XP Pro downgrade rights is the only thing fitting into the corporate world. What your reviewing is still a consumer laptop. With just 1GB of ram to add on top of that. Certainly the 800 dollars N10J-A2 would be more difficult to justify. And only then you can talk corporate.
ltcommanderdata - Wednesday, December 24, 2008 - link
I thought the XP Home thing was mandated by Microsoft for netbooks. As in Microsoft will only continue selling XP in it's Home form for netbooks which only have 1GB of RAM. ASUS can't put XP Pro in since it's no longer directly available and I would guess using Vista Business by default would increase the price and of course reduce performance.strikeback03 - Wednesday, December 24, 2008 - link
As of September, our campus computer store was still selling licenses for XP Pro to use with our Volume License media.I haven't needed one since then, but businesses with volume licenses can probably upgrade if needed.ltcommanderdata - Wednesday, December 24, 2008 - link
That's kind of different. XP is still available for smaller OEMs, but I'm pretty sure that XP isn't available for big name companies like ASUS anymore unless they stick with the netbook restrictions.