The Asus Eee PC 1000HV, which is only available in Italy at the moment, is the first Eee PC netbook to feature a dedicated graphics card. It offers improved graphics performance when playing video games or handling other tasks that would make the Intel GMA 950 integrated graphics found in most netbooks choke.
But Netbook News Italia put the Eee PC 1000HV to the test to see how it handles 720p and 1080p HD video. The answer is a bit disappointing. Like most Intel Atom powered netbooks, the Eee PC 1000HV had no trouble at all with 720p video. But 1080p was another story. While the video plays back much smoother than it would on a computer with an Atom CPU and integrated graphics, the audio lags behind the video.
It’s a bit tough to tell what’s going on in the test, because the sample video used doesn’t contain a lot of dialog. But if you pick a point in the first half of the video and make a note of what’s being said when a certain even occurs onscreen, then skip ahead to the 1080p test, you’ll note that the audio is playing an unsuccessful game of catch up. This could become really frustrating if you try watching a full length movie.
If you’re looking for a netbook that can handle 1080p video (which is kind of silly since no netbook in existence has a screen capable of displaying 1080p resolutions), you might want to hold out for a machine with a Broadcom video accelerator or NVIDIA ION chipset.
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