Asus Eee PC 1101HA unboxing video + manual overclocking tested
July 2, 2009 at 3:51 pm
We have already seen some unboxing pictures of the Asus Eee PC 1101HA Seashell, but now a video unboxing has emerged of the 11.6-inch Eee PC netbook courtesy of Notebook Italia. The styling is very similar to other netbooks in the Seashell line-up and Asus could be onto a winner given its 11.6-inch high-resolution (1366 x 768) display and power efficient 1.33GHz Z520 Atom CPU and Poulsbo (US15W) chipset. The 1101HA is packaged like any other Asus Eee PC netbook. It also comes with the usual accessories including 6-cell 4400mAh battery. The video is attached below.
Notebook Italia also had a close look at the manual overclocking tool that we reported on recently. As a quick recap, Asus provides an automatic clocking tool in the form of its Super Hybrid Engine (SHE). Using this you can under/overclock depending on your usage but the clock speeds are predefined. The Eee PC 1101HA is the first netbook that Asus has allowed users to manually overclock the CPU themselves through the BIOS.
You can move this overclock value in 5 percent increments up to 30 percent and then there is the maximum overclock set to 32 percent. In the manual, Asus suggests that as you move to higher levels, system stability may be affected. They found that once you reach 30 percent and above, the netbook would constantly freeze. To show the kind of performance benefits, the Super Pi benchmark was run at different settings and the results are charted below.
It is quite clear to see the benefits of overclocking, a 15 percent overclock has a marked gain over the standard clock speeds. More importantly, once you increase this further, performance is as good if not better than N280 Atom-based models. The great thing is that whilst the flip side to higher clock speeds is increased temperatures, the ‘Z’ Atom series runs cooler than the ‘N’ processors, which means thermal performance isn’t heavily compromised.
One of our main concerns with the Eee PC 1101HA was whether the 1.33GHz Z520 Atom CPU is powerful enough to view HD content on its high-resolution display. However, given that Asus has been more than generous in providing an overclocking tool, you can easily look to match and exceed clock speeds of the 1.66GHz N280 Atom CPU. It still makes us wonder though how much better it would be if the same percentage overclocks were applied to the 1.6GHz Z530 processor.
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