The Asus Eee PC 1201PN isn’t available to the public yet, but the folks at Notebookcheck managed to get their hands on a pre-release version of this 12.1 inch laptop. Superficially, the notebook looks pretty much the same as the Asus Eee PC 1201N or Asus UL20A. But under the hood it has a 1.66GHz Intel Atom N450 processor and NVIDIA’s second generation ION graphics processor.

According to Notebookcheck, the new graphics processor makes quite a difference. The Eee PC 1201PN notched a 3098 score in 3DMark05, compared with 2143 for the older Eee PC 1201N. But while the Eee PC 1201PN has a newer processor, it’s a single core CPU compared with the dual core Atom 330 processor in last year’s Eee PC 1201N — which should make the older model a bit faster when it comes to tasks that rely on the CPU rather than the GPU.

Gaming is a bit of a mixed bag, with some games such as World of Warcraft and Battlefield Heroes playing smoothly with high frame rates, while other games such as Anno 1404 dropped a few too many frames to play comfortably.

The computer had no problem handling most HD video playback, although it struggled a bit with HD flash video in full screen mode.

NotebookCheck suggests you should be able to get 3 to 6.5 hours of run time out of the battery depending on what you’re doing with the computer.

Overall, it sounds like the Eee PC 1201PN is a nice machine for someone looking for something a little larger than a netbook with significantly better graphics performance. But it’s not a high end gaming machine. If that’s what you’re looking for, you might be better off with an Alienware M11x. Nnor is it going to be much faster than a typical netbook at everyday tasks such as launching applications, multitasking, editing documents, or surfing the web. You’ll probably want a system with a faster processor for that, such as the Asus UL20A.

via Eee PC.it

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5 replies on “Asus Eee PC 1201PN with next-gen NVIDIA ION graphics tested”

  1. I don’t understand why the battery life is so poor. Acer is claiming up to 10 hours for the 532g.

  2. No computer in the world can play Flash video smoothly. If you need to watch Flash video, you deserve it.

  3. These Asus models (1201N, etc) using the 330 CPU are actually nettops, or the netbook equivalent of desktop replacement netbooks.

    The newest version of the 330 CPU is the D510; I think Intel was noticing the confusion, and wisely added the D so people would know the D510 (and the 330 which it replaced) were really for nettops rahter than netbooks.

    The TDP of these CPUs is 8W typically vs. the TDP of 5.5W for
    N450/N470, the latest generation of Pineview Atom netbook CPUs (often mistakenly referred to by media as Pine Trail CPUs). The chipset is Pine Trail, the CPU is Pineview.

    I can put up with grammatical errors in articles, but articles which
    don’t get all their facts correct dminish their usefulness.

    1. I agree that the second paragraph was phrased poorly and I edited it for clarity. But what facts are you saying I got wrong?

      Asus *did* release the Eee PC 1201N with the Atom 330 processor, and among the first crop of notebooks with NVIDIA ION graphics, it was the one that performed the best in non-GPU intensive tasks.

      It doesn’t really matter what Intel wanted PC makers to do with the Atom 330 chip. What’s relevant here is that the 1201PN has faster graphics, but the 1201N had a dual core processor and better-than-average graphics.

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