Performance:
Running off an Intel Atom N270 clocking in at 1.6GHz, with 1GB of DDR2 RAM, a 160GB Hard Disk and a good old reliable Intel GMA 945 the NC10 handles your average day to day tasks extremely well. Word Processing is a doddle, even at this resolution. Web browsing isn’t an issue as mostly every website fits into the horizontal resolution (1024) easily. The GMA chipset handles non 3D applications with ease.
The NC10 can, at the touch of a button (well two actually) switch between three speed states. Normal, Silent and Turbo. The latter obviously running the CPU at it’s full 1.6GHz speed and at the same time upping it’s vCore to 1.25v, but sacrificing battery life in the process. Silent seems to be no different from normal mode so the difference between the two remains to be seen.
Normal
Silent
Turbo
What I wasn’t expecting was very good video playback. Using KM Player’s internal codecs the NC10 was handling high res Divx’s without any stutter at all. Even 720p MKV’s were handled with no frame rate issues. However the processor was topping out at this stage with an 80% CPU usage rate.
Viewing high resolution videos is not something I will be using this machine for but it is nice to know that it can turn in a good performance for video playback if required.
For a laugh I decided to install Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and the newer San Andreas. Both games ran fine, but only Vice City recognised the NC10′s 1024×600 resolution and I could run around in-game just fine. San Andreas however was a pain and would not go higher than a resolution of 800×600. Once I managed to get in-game, it was a slugfest with poor frame rates. I have yet to work out why since graphically San Andreas hardly differs that much to Vice City. So lightweight gaming is possible on the NC10. Whether you’d want to is another matter altogether though.
Recent Comments