HP Mini 311 — Flash Video Meets ION
We discussed recently the new 10.1 Beta of Flash, which adds DXVA acceleration for videos. We tested everything from standard YouTube and Hulu videos up through 1080p YouTube videos on the HP Mini 311. We even connected an external 1080p LCD to see how the system would handle scaling to such a high resolution. The results are shown in the following table (repeated from our Flash 10.1 article).
| HP Mini 311 (ION LE) Full Screen 1366x768 Performance |
||
| Flash 10.0.32.18 | Flash 10.1.51.45 | |
| Hulu HD 720p - LOTS - Avg. CPU | 98% | 66% |
| Hulu HD 720p - LOTS - FPS | 1.1 | 24.2 |
| Hulu 480p - The Office - Avg. CPU | 92% | 66% |
| Hulu 480p - The Office - FPS | 7.1 | 27.6 |
| YouTube HD 720p - PoP - Avg. CPU | 90% | 69% |
| YouTube HD 720p - PoP - FPS (Dropped) | 10.5 (1519) | 24.0 (0) |
While Flash 10.0 struggled with quite a few videos, 10.1 enables ION netbooks (and nettops) to work without skipping. Presumably this will also help out any laptop/netbook with the necessary hardware to handle HD video decoding offload. That means that netbooks using the GMA 500 IGP ought to work (we couldn't confirm this yet), but most netbooks currently use GMA 950. The 945GSE chipset in this case can't help with DXVA, which means that fullscreen HD Flash video isn't going to run on such netbooks. If you like HD YouTube/Hulu/etc., that could be the killer app that makes the ION a must have compared to other netbooks.
Sounds great, right? Let's take a moment to look at the bigger picture, though. GMA 950 is old news… very old news. It's only still around because ASUS decided to make a slow laptop and sell it for $300, kicking off the netbook era. While we like the idea of smaller laptops with good battery life, Atom still leaves a lot to be desired, and the platform as a whole has plenty of shortcomings.
If you can manage to spend a bit more money, laptops like the Acer Timeline series include the much improved GS45 chipset (GMA 4500MHD) and Core 2 Ultra Low Voltage (CULV) CPUs. That combination is able to handle DXVA as well, and even the lower end dual-core Pentium SU4100 (1.30GHz 2MB cache) and Celeron SU2300 (1.20GHz 1MB cache) are significantly faster than the Atom N270/N280.
You can find such laptops starting at $400 (e.g. the Gateway EC1435u), and they make a very compelling argument against Atom netbooks. In terms of video decoding — be it Flash, x264, or something else — ION clearly leads other Atom netbooks but ends up tying the CULV solutions. Gaming would still be in favor of ION, perhaps, though it lacks the CPU power to make that matter. What about CUDA?
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JarredWalton - Sunday, November 22, 2009 - link
I have a Timeline 1810 for review, so I actually have practical hands-on experience. Plus, when you consider the RAM upgrade on the 311, and a few other sundry extras, you quickly get a more realistic base price of $450 to $500.At that point, comparisons with anything from the 1410 (and the Gateway EC 1435u I mentioned) through the $650 Timeline/EC models are all valid. Unfortunately, I don't have the $400 laptops in for review. I can come up with a fairly reasonable idea of how they'll perform, however, and the Celeron SU2300 is by far the best option for a small netbook right now.
QChronoD - Sunday, November 22, 2009 - link
Do you guys run a default calibration on all of the displays before you test them or are those numbers OOTB?JarredWalton - Sunday, November 22, 2009 - link
Those numbers are using ColorEyes Display Pro to calibrate the LCDs. I have tried in the past to come up with an "out of box" result, and either the LCDs are all horrific (typically Delta E will average around 12 to 15), or I'm not doing the test properly. Without a way to be 100% sure what was going on, I decided to just stop doing those tests.Ultimately, I think most users will adapt to however a display looks, unless they're really serious about color quality. When we're looking at netbooks, I think the vast majority of users never really pay attention to the LCDs. Obviously, I do pay some attention, but unless a display is really good I'm not going to spend much time on that area. Right now, most of the laptop LCDs are junk.
hyc - Sunday, November 22, 2009 - link
Amen to that. I find it incredible that vendors are selling 15" displays with only 1366x768 resolution. (While these 11" netbooks have the same resolution.) When I buy a 50% larger screen, I expect 50% more workspace, not 50% larger pixels. WTF...Lord 666 - Sunday, November 22, 2009 - link
I own two HP 311 Mini's (one custom built and other 1037NR from VZW)and one HP 1151NR from VZW and can say the keyboard and touchpad placement were compromised on the 311s from older versions. The smooth keys and angle due to 6 cell make it challenging to type on than the 1151's matte finish and flat bottom. Plus, the left/right mouse buttons on the bottom make it tough to click compared to 1151.However, compared to the older 1151 there are many advantages (screen size, larger stock battery and RAM, easy access to internals) and the reason why I picked up a second HP 311. The HP 1151 is being traded in tomorrow.
fokka - Sunday, November 22, 2009 - link
jarred, you act like an atom limits the performance/experience even in simple day to day applications. i have to admit, i had similar gripes before my gf got her asus 1005hah, but now i learned, that this standard atom-netbook is delivering quite well in everyday tasks.(of course) i had the pleasure to set this thing up installing software etc and i also did a lot of web-browsing and not even in this new youtube 1080p video-sample (fullscreen) i had slow-downs while bettery life was exceptional (8-10h) because i could use the super-power-save mode.
boot and hibernate etc also were much faster than on our standard notebooks (dell vostro c2d).
so while atom is extremely slow in raw numbers compared to other cpus, the everyday tasks of the average user dont suffer from this limitation.
just want to make things clear ;) otherwise excellent review, thanks!
Mint - Sunday, November 22, 2009 - link
Not to mention that for more compute intensive operations (other than games and multimedia authoring) there's always VNC or remote desktop. Works well for a bunch of engineering and scientific software.Netbook+desktop is a very good alternative to a single power notebook, and often comes in cheaper and more portable to boot.
ssj4Gogeta - Monday, November 23, 2009 - link
I bought this dv6-1154tx for INR 67,000 (approx. US $1400) when I joined uni this year. Should have got a $1000 desktop and a $400 netbook instead. Now I'm stuck with this notebook for another couple years or so at least.Lonyo - Sunday, November 22, 2009 - link
I got an Asus 751h with the slower 1.33GHz processor, and apart from being sluggish on Youtube and some other unnecessarily intensive sites, for what I actually use it for, writing papers in the library, it's perfectly functional.Most of the time is spent checking websites for resources, looking at pdfs and using Word 07, and for all those tasks it's fine.
Sure I can't encode stuff, but who would dream of doing that?
JarredWalton - Sunday, November 22, 2009 - link
But have either of you tried something like a Timeline 1810? I have, and I can tell you that the experience is better than Atom -- quite a bit better in many instances. It's not just about raw, CPU intensive performance; the 1810 boots faster (marginally) and loads applications faster. Trying to open a dialog while a video is decoding as one example is horrible on Atom -- better to pause the video first.Basically, Atom *can* do what you need, but so can just about any other CPU currently out there.