Asus Eee PC 1015PN – first impressions

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From HP to Asus. From GMA3150 to ION 2. From N550 to N570. What's it like?

As you might know, I recently blew up my HP’s Mini 110’s screen. I sent it in for servicing hoping expecting to pay about $150-200. Although that is half as much as what my netbook is worth, I wouldn’t mind paying it. Of course, who’d know that the people at the service centre don’t really get this fact and decided to charge me $441. I just gave them the Yao Ming laughing face (cf. f7u12.com) and I went out to look for a new netbook. There are true joys of using a netbook that other, larger computer users will never experience – long battery life, great portability, lightness and netbooks are extremely cheap. Of course, having some experience with a netbook, I knew what I wanted, as I have outlined in a guide.

I personally do not like Asus because of previous experiences with the brand. Somehow, they always have some sort of problem and generally do not look as good as computers from HP or Dell. However, the fact that they are always significantly cheaper and still highly functional always makes me overlook these. After all, with the same money, I can get a high-end netbook but probably a standard Atom-only HP or Dell. The two competitors were the AMD C-50 powered 1015B or the Atom-and-ION2 powered 1015PN. Both have discrete graphics which will guarantee good performance when playing 1080p videos. The way both netbooks work is a bit different. While the AMD has only one graphics card – the Radeon – the 1015PN has two – the integrated Intel GMA 3150 and the ION 2 graphics chip. The way this computer is built is simple to explain – take a regular NM10 motherboard from Intel and retrofit a more powerful graphics chip inside, while giving it 512MB worth of VRAM.

I didn't like line art, so I decided to get a new netbook.

Arguably, both netbooks put up a close fight. And initially, it had always been my intention to get the 1015B (the AMD-based netbook), but when I headed into the mall, a store was offering both the 1015B and the 1015PN for $398 and $399 (Singaporean dollars) respectively, although the latter usually had a MSRP of $429 – $449. Effectively, what was a straightforward decision became ten times harder, and after some hasty research using the keyword 1015PN vs 1015B, I came to the conclusion that the 1015PN was a wiser choice because it had better graphics rendering ability. On the other hand, the 1015PN does lose out processor-wise, despite its raw numbers pointing otherwise – 1.66GHz dual-core Atom chip versus a 1.0Ghz dual-core C-50 chip. If anything, I have always found the biggest bottleneck to be the graphics chip on netbooks, and therefore the 1015PN made the most sense. The added ability to revert back to the integrated GMA 3150 chip was also an added plus because I write reviews for games on netbooks, and most first-time netbook buyers tend not to have discrete graphics in their netbook.

First impressions aren’t that great. Asus has much to learn about good design. Coming from a HP netbook, the Asus looks very industrial. The Seashell platform was designed to keep things functional, but not eye-pleasing. On its default configuration, it does not allow you to use Nvidia’s Optimus – which is a technology that will engage the integrated graphics card when you’re doing less graphically demanding tasks, and vice versa, without restarting. Windows 7 Starter presents a greater bottleneck here as you realise that you need at least Home Premium to enjoy the seamless transition between integrated and discrete graphics. The computer is also loaded with a lot of bloatware, and the bloatware really tarnishes the experience significantly, especially on the already-strained 1GB RAM.

All roads leads to the evil Android bot.

Promptly, I upgraded it to Home Premium to enjoy Optimus, gave it 2GB worth of RAM, and threw in a SD Card for ReadyBoost. All was well and all was great, until I realised that Optimus was having issues. And it wasn’t only me. A lot of people have the same problem as me, and it turned out that certain drivers do not work well with the Asus 1015PN. Certain solutions were to revert back to the factory-provided driver, use the 275.33 driver and not the latest ones and install the Intel drivers provided by Asus. It was quite frustrating to say the least, although the truth is that this is something I’ve come to accept when buying an Asus.

EDIT: The ION 2 actually performs worse than the Radeon 62xx. This is because the ION 2 in 10″ netbooks only have 8 cores rather than the 16 cores you’ll get with a 11″ and above netbook. 3DMark scores are approximately – 1,500 for the 8-core ION 2 on the 1015PN, 1,900 on the Radeon-powered 1015B and 2,400 on the 16-core ION 2.

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