NbC: Samsung N510 Review

« 1. Introduction2. Build & Design3. Upgradeability, Dimensions & Weight 4. Ports, Features & Connectivity5. Keyboard & Touchpad6. Display, Speakers, Heat & Noise 7. Performance & Benchmarks8. Battery Life9. Conclusion10. View All »

Performance

The Samsung N510 is powered by a 1.66GHz N280 Atom processor. This has a 512KB cache, 667MHz FSB and supports Hyper-Threading Technology, allowing the operating system to run two threads on one core. Samsung provides no official means to overclock the processor, unlike Asus’ Super Hybrid Engine that allows you to overclock (or underclock) the CPU depending on usage.

The real page turner for the N510 however is the inclusion of the Nvidia ION chipset. This compromises of the Nvidia GeForce 9400M GPU with 128MB memory. The inclusion of the Nvidia graphics part brings the ability to play HD video & Flash content as well as 3D games (albeit at low resolutions).

Much like most other netbooks, I found the Samsung N510 to be perfectly acceptable in terms of light multi-tasking including browsing, streaming music as well as using Office documents. If you use the right software, there is no reason why you can’t do even heavier multi-tasking. Many programs are CPU dependent so ION doesn’t really make any difference, for now.

Video Performance

The Nvidia ION chipset brings with it a tangible difference when trying to view high-definition video content. Hardware acceleration means that we could play 1080p videos buttery smooth with just 25 to 30 percent CPU usage. It really was quite refreshing being able to play 1080p .mov trailers and videos without any effort whatsoever.

Obviously, you need to use a media player capable of DXVA (DirectX Video Acceleration) that takes advantage of the Nvidia ION chipset. Thankfully, Samsung has included such software in the package in the form of CyberLink PowerDVD 8. You could also download Media Player Classic Home Cinema that has wider codec support. If you install Windows 7 on the N510 at a later point then Windows Media Player 12 includes native DXVA support.

HD Flash Video

Trying to play flash video has often been too much for netbooks to handle. Most netbooks I’ve played around with often had a very high CPU usage even when just playing standard YouTube video content. Thankfully, there’s no such problem with the ION-powered Samsung N510.

Adobe recently released a new (beta) version of Flash that brought with it hardware acceleration. We’re happy to say that it worked very well on the N510. We needed to update the Nvidia driver to 195.62 and used the Adobe Flash Player 10.2 beta 2 (10.1.51.66).

We were able to play both 720p and 1080p HD windowed YouTube video without problems, CPU usage was around the 70-80 percent mark. However, whilst 1080p full screen video was watchable you could notice the dropped frames that meant it wasn’t smooth. Without Flash Player 10.1 though the HD YouTube video was literally a slideshow and completely unwatchable. ION is a definite big advantage here.

Games

Playing games is a definite possibility on the Samsung N510 although you need to be realistic in terms of what the ION chipset can achieve. We tested some of the latest games including Modern Warfare 2 and F.E.A.R 2 and just about got it running at 20fps with the lowest resolution (800 x 600) and the lowest settings. Obviously these types of games are probably asking too much for the system but it’s nice to know it’s an option.

Benchmarks

As usual, we ran a number of different benchmarks to see exactly how the N510 fares against its peers. All tests were conducted at the stock speed (1.66GHz) of the CPU. All benchmark tests were undertaken in battery mode.

Boot time

The Samsung N510 had reasonably quick boot times, taking 34.3 seconds to reach the log on screen. Shutting down was also very quick at 22.7 seconds. Both of these were average times taken across three attempts.

GeekBench

Geekbench provides a number of different benchmarks to accurately measure processor and memory performance. The N510 came top with a score of 924, beating the second-placed 1000HE (913).

3DMark03

The dedicated graphics chipset really shows here delivering a score of 3,593 compared to second-placed 1000HE with 780.

3DMark06

The same result is seen with 3DMark06, with the N510 trouncing the competition with a score of 1,301.

Super Pi

Using Super Pi to calculate Pi to 1 million digits took the N510 90 seconds, not quite as fast as the 1000HE at 88 seconds. This shows that with no hardware acceleration, the N510 is as fast/slow as typical netbooks on the market.

For those that may be interested, we ran Super Pi across all digits and we have included the results below.

wPrime

The Samsung N510 scored the fastest time in wPrime, taking 117.546 seconds to complete the 32M test. This is under five seconds faster than the MSI Wind U115.

This was also the case on the 1024M test with the N510 completing it in 3,753 seconds. This is ahead of the U115 at 3,921 seconds.

7-Zip

7-Zip is a free compression tool and genuine alternative to WinRAR. Decompressing a large file is one of those places where a slower CPU can leave you waiting for a few seconds, so we thought it would be a fitting application to test. Using the internal benchmark this measures compression and decompression performance in MIPS and provides an average result.

It is multi-threaded so takes advantage of the latest multi-core enabled CPUs. The N280 Atom CPU supports Hyper-Threading Technology, allowing the operating system to run two threads on one core. We therefore ran the benchmark using two CPU threads. We left the benchmark to accumulate at least 10 runs using a 32MB Dictionary size in order to get a solid, average result. The N510 scored 1324 MIPS coming ahead of the Samsung N120 at 1295MIPs.

Peacekeeper

FutureMark’s Peacekeeper is a benchmark that uses JavaScript to measure browser performance during web rendering. Given that one of the main tasks on netbooks is surfing the net, we thought it we would be an apt benchmark to use. However, as you would expect, the performance can differ greatly depending on which browser is used.

For this test, we ran it across Internet Explorer 8 (8.0.6001.18702), Firefox (3.0.10) and Opera (9.64). As can be seen below, the N510 scored the best results we’ve seen so far.

CrystalMark

CrystalMark is a benchmarking utility for testing your computer performance by running various benchmark tests. CrystalMark lets you test your CPU, memory, HDD and Video (GDI, Direct Draw, OpenGL). The overall score of 40,203 was significantly ahead of the competition (the 1000HE scored 30,146) mainly due to the ION chipset.

CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark evaluates the performance of your hard drives based on two tests – a sequential read/write test and a random read/write test. You can select the drive to test, the number of test and the size of the data to test which can be 50MB, 100MB, 500MB and 1000MB. The results displayed below have been conducted using 5 rounds of the 100MB test. The read/write speeds for the HDD marginally faster than the Samsung N120.

HD Tune

HD Tune is a hard disk utility that can measure the raw performance of your drive, including transfer rate, burst rate and access time. The average transfer rate of the HDD was 52.5MB/sec whilst the access time was 21.0ms.

« 1. Introduction2. Build & Design3. Upgradeability, Dimensions & Weight 4. Ports, Features & Connectivity5. Keyboard & Touchpad6. Display, Speakers, Heat & Noise 7. Performance & Benchmarks8. Battery Life9. Conclusion10. View All »