What Asus Eee PC 1000HV High Definition Mode does

We’ve been puzzling over the “High Definition Mode” in the Asus Eee PC Super Hybrid Engine software ever since a user uncovered an image for the mystery mode tucked away in the executable files. Now that the first netbook to actually make use of the new HD mode is available (in Italy, anyway), the folks at Notebook Italia were kind enough to figure out what the heck it does.

The answer’s not all that surprising. It overclocks the Intel Atom processor to give your system a slightly better chance of decoding HD movies with the aid of the Eee PC 1000HV’s included ATI Radeon GPU. So for those keeping score, here’s what happens when you use the Super Hybrid Engine in several different modes:

Power Saving: 1.2GHz clock speed
High Performance: 1.6GHz
Super High Performance: 1.7GHz
High Definition Mode: 1.8GHz

You’ll pay a price for switching on HD mode. The battery will run down a bit faster and your computer will run a bit warmer. But if you’re looking for a temporary performance boost, this is probably the safest way to get it… even though some hackers have managed to user other tools to overclock the Atom CPU to run at over 2GHz.

Posted on Friday, May 29th, 2009, 12:45 pm by Brad Linder

Bob

I don't follow the Atom hacker community. Does anyone know if overclocking the Atom to 2ghz results in better performance when streaming video from Hulu or YouTube?
Marco

just a little correction
Atom N280 CPU in Power Saving mode scale down to 751 MHz
jer85008

I have a Mini 10 with the Z520 (1.33Ghz) processor and frequently overclock the FSB with setFSB to bring the speed up to 1.6Ghz with no significant heat, loss of battery life, or stability issues. I imagine you could OC the 1.6 version close to 2Ghz if you wanted to. (I “accidentaly” ran mine up to 2Ghz once, it just instantly shut down). It does make a significant difference in performance, especially with streaming video. I still can't stream full-screen video (even at std. resolution), but it helps.
Bob

I don't follow the Atom hacker community. Does anyone know if overclocking the Atom to 2ghz results in better performance when streaming video from Hulu or YouTube?
Marco

just a little correction
Atom N280 CPU in Power Saving mode scale down to 751 MHz
jer85008

I have a Mini 10 with the Z520 (1.33Ghz) processor and frequently overclock the FSB with setFSB to bring the speed up to 1.6Ghz with no significant heat, loss of battery life, or stability issues. I imagine you could OC the 1.6 version close to 2Ghz if you wanted to. (I “accidentaly” ran mine up to 2Ghz once, it just instantly shut down). It does make a significant difference in performance, especially with streaming video. I still can't stream full-screen video (even at std. resolution), but it helps.
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What Asus Eee PC 1000HV High Definition Mode does

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