Toshiba NB550D netbook with AMD C-50 chip gets benchmarked

The Toshiba NB550D is one of the first 10 inch netbooks to ship with an AMD C-50 Fusion chip with integrated Radeon HD 6250 graphics. We already know that the chip can handle 1080p HD video playback and DirectX 11 graphics, but how does this 1 GHz dual core chip fare against the Intel Atom chips that currently dominate the netbook space? While the NB550D isn’t available in the US, Netbook News picked up a unit in Taiwan and today the site published some of the first benchmarks.

Update: For more details about AND’s low-power chipset, check out our complete review of the Acer Aspire One 522 netbook which also has an AMD C-50 processor and Radeon HD 6250 graphics.

Here are the highlights:

• The TDP of the chip is 8W, which means it actually uses slightly less power than the 8.5W Intel Atom N550.
• The computer notched an 1889 in 3DMark06.
• In the CrystalMark benchmark, the NB550D scored a little higher than an Acer netbook with an Intel Atom N550 chip… but not much higher.
• HD video playback appears to depend on the codec. MOV and Flash video are supported, but MKV files aren’t (at least not out of the box).
• 3D video games (including Crysis) played smoothly.

That 1886 score on 3DMark06 is particularly interesting. When I ran the same test on the Aspire Aspire One 521 with the AMD Athlon II K125 chip and Radeon 4225 graphics, I got a score of just 1505. The NB550D definitely wins here. Computers with first-generation NVIDIA ION graphics also tend to get between 1280 and 1560 on this test.

In fact, the only low power computer I’ve tested that gets a higher 3DMark06 score than the NB550D was the Lenovo IdeaCentre Q150, a nettop with second-generation NVIDIA ION graphics. That computer got a score of 2585.

So NVIDIA ION 2 appears to offer better graphics performance than the AMD Radeon HD 6250 graphics you get with the AMD C-50 chip. But I haven’t seen any 10 inch netbooks with ION 2 graphics.

In terms of overall CPU performance, as UMPC Portal points out, despite the higher CrystalMark score, the Toshiba NB550D actually gets lower marks in terms of CPU performance than the average netbook with an Intel Atom N550 dual core CPU. We’re not talking about a huge difference though, so it seems like we can probably expect overall performance that’s on-par with a machine with an Intel Atom chip and better-than-first-generation NVIDIA ION graphics.

Programs which can take advantage of GPU acceleration will likely run quite well on the platform, but software that relies entirely on the CPU may be another story. You shouldn’t have any problems with everyday tasks such as web browsing, composing documents, or even doing some minor editing of media files — but for CPU-intensive tasks you’re probably better off with a machine that has a more powerful chip such as the AMD E-350 Zacate processor.