How Windows sees netbook CPUs

Credit: YugaTech

Windows Vista and Windows 7 have a built-in tool for rating your computer’s hardware. The Windows Experience Index looks at your CPU, RAM, hard drive, and graphics performance and gives a score for each area that’s designed to give you a halfway decent guesstimate on how well the operating system will run on your hardware. A lower score doesn’t necessarily mean that the OS won’t run, just that it may not perform quite as well as on hardware with higher scores.

The folks at YugaTech took a look at the Windows Experience scores for 14 different processors commonly found in netbooks and thin and light notebooks. The results aren’t all that surprising if you’ve been following the ultraportable space for the past year or two. But if you’re trying to decide between a system with an Atom N280, Atom N450, AMD Neo MV-40, or Intel Pentium Dual Core SU4100 CPU, this chart might come in handy.

It’s worth pointing out that the Windows Experience Index doesn’t take all factors into account. For instance, these scores won’t tell you that the AMD chips generally use far more energy than the Intel chips, which takes a toll on battery life. And the scores don’t actually calculate raw processing power. Instead it looks at how well the processor can handle specific Windows applications such as Windows Media Center, Aero desktop effects, and so forth.

OK, keeping that in mind, I found it interesting that the Intel Atom N270, N280, and N450 all got the same sub-score of 2.3. The Atom Z540 and Z550, on the other hand, received higher scores of 2.6 and 2.9 respectively, while the AMD and Intel CULV processors found in 11.6 inch and larger thin and lights generally outperformed most of the Atom processors.

You can find more details at YugaTech.

via Netbook Reports